If you’ve been keeping on top of your WordPress updates using the automatic upgrade feature, you may have run into a problem immediately after upgrading. A message that prevents access to any page on your blog, “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. Even if you’ve already completed the upgrade, this message could still appear. It’s not a fun situation and, admittedly, I freaked out the first time I ran into that problem. Fortunately, your life as you know it isn’t over…there is salvation ahead, and it’s brain-dead simple.
Cause of the Maintenance Message
During an automatic upgrade, WordPress places a file in the blog root directory called “.maintenance” to prevent visitors from being confronted with ugly, broken pages during the upgrade process. That’s a great little built-in feature, but if the upgrade gets interrupted or fails for any reason, that file doesn’t get deleted and nobody, including you, can access your blog. No worries, this is (most likely) the simplest fix on Earth.
Removing the Maintenance Message
All you have to do is delete the .maintenance file from the blog root directory. Simple as it gets. After you’ve deleted the files you should be able to access the site just fine, but you may have to run the automatic upgrade again. How do you know if you should run it again? You’ll see a notification on the dashboard page that a new version of WordPress is available…same as you always see when a new upgrade is available. If you don’t see that message, you’re good to go.
Of course, this fix assumes the blog upgrade failure was really just a one-time occurence and not a symptom of a larger problem. If you’ve deleted the file and the automatic upgrade continues to fail, you’ve probably got a larger issue at hand, and that’s a topic far too long to cover in this article.
Thank you for this post! I would have been in a huge panic if it weren’t for your explanation. Hoping I can get my web site up and running soon!
Best,
Lisa
Thanks for this. I was able to get everthing sorted in minutes. I appreciate your help.
Wow thanks google and this post, i was a bit afraid during few seconds. My wp is back online.
Thanks for the post! Although I had to not delete file, but it helped me.
Whew! I hadn’t seen that before – after refreshing and waiting and refreshing again, I was glad to find this article
Thanks, I’m back up and running again!
Nice advice for an annoying problem. Ive seen that maintenance message last as long as 20 minutes. I was starting to think it was some other problem.
This was a very helpful tip. The auto-update died on one of my plugins and there was no way to get back into the admin pages. A quick ssh and rename of the file and I was back in business. Thanks!
Very helpfull indeed. Just got my site up and running again, thanks to you!
Glad I could help!
Thanks a million! I did freak out when I couldn’t get to my site. This was a real life saver!
I had this problem too, but when I got into my FTP I couldn’t find the .maintenance file. I had to force show hidden files to find and delete it. FYI In FileZilla it’s under the ‘Server’ tab. Thank you very much for saving a panic attack!
Thanks so much! I was in a panic when I saw the message, and you came to my rescue.
Brilliant thanks. Worked a treat. Good to have this kind of support for WP/server “newbies”! Just in case same happens to anyone else, I could see the maintenance file straight away in the directory list using ie ftp client, but I couldn’t see it when I clicked the Open FTP site in windows explorer. So I accessed it through the Control Panel on the server instead. All is well!
Thanks-
a 10 second fix for something that had me going until I read this!
Lifesaver…
Oh man, and i went through the crap of backing up my database, deleting it all, reinstalling wp and importing database each time lolz…
LIFESAVER
Glad I could help…even if a little late
And that was a timely help. thanks a lot
Gracias!
Awesome! I was afraid I was going to have to delete all the plugins etc. Thanks so much for keeping me sane