WordPress Stuck: Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.
I almost never use the WordPress Update system from directly within the WordPress admin panel to update a site or to update plugins. It just seems that more often than not something hangs and forces me to do it manually with FTP anyway.
But… I was trying to work quickly this afternoon and I decided to go ahead and use the WordPress update functions.
FAIL!
I clicked the update link and entered the site’s FTP credentials and pressed submit. At first it looked good, but it then quickly became apparant that the update was hanging and not going to complete correctly. At this point the site was a blank white page with the following text:
Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.
Since the site appeared to hang during the update, I went ahead and fired up the FTP and transferred all the files over to the server to manually update WordPress. Unfortunately, this didn’t fix the problem! The site was stuck with the maintenance screen and I had no web access to the admin panel.
After poking around I found the problem. It looks like the .maintenance file didn’t get deleted when the update hung up.
Luckily, if you ever get stuck on the maintenance screen all you have to do is delete the .maintenance file in the root location of your website’s files using FTP. Once this file is removed, the site will no longer be locked out. If there is still a problem with your install, you should now at least see an error to tip you off.
15 Comments On This Topic
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January 19, 2012 at 1:25 pm
thank you for your tip! it was helpin me
May 22, 2012 at 7:18 pm
thank you so much for this, I almost had a heart attack when I got this same screen
June 15, 2012 at 5:24 am
the .maintenance is a hidden file, make sure you ftp agent is showing all files, if not download FileZilla to do the job. Cheers
June 24, 2012 at 8:35 am
Thanks a lot men for this really simple solution!
July 11, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Thank you! That saved me a full re-install!!
July 27, 2012 at 2:22 am
That was really a great find i thought to manually delete the plugins and reinstall but after seeing your solution i was happy dont need to do a lot of work.
August 10, 2012 at 12:15 am
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August 22, 2012 at 7:51 am
Thanks – helpful, and the site came back immediately. By the way, all the comment text is white here on the light background, so reading comments impossible unless you highlight the text with a mouse
August 23, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Thanks for pointing that out… I just updated a bunch of stuff on this site and it looks like the DISQUS Plugin broke.
September 10, 2012 at 6:50 am
Thanks for the short but point tip. It has definitely saved me from having to call a client and explain how I broke his site
I might add that if you use a shared hosting service like Hostgator, you may have to check ‘show hidden files’ before you can see the .maintenance file.
MJ
September 10, 2012 at 7:46 am
[...] thanks to Zachgraeve.com for first posting the solution here. Related PostsDefeating Blogger’s Block: Five Easy Tips on How to Blog When You’ve [...]
September 23, 2012 at 3:15 pm
Thanks HEAPS for your post! I just had the same issue – googled and found your instructions. Problem fixed! Thanks!
September 27, 2012 at 8:48 pm
Thank you SOOOO MUCH! This was exactly what I needed!
September 28, 2012 at 6:57 pm
THANK YOU, God!
What a massive fail. Luckily your article was on Page 1, top 3, for this query. Fixed in about 120 seconds.
For anyone else, I also had to switch to Development mode / pause Cloudflare so my change could go through. Because I kept deleting the cock-a-doody file, and it’d pop right back…
I’m finally beginning to remember that when site changes don’t stick, I have to turn off my CDN and retry.
Thank you!
December 12, 2012 at 8:36 am
Thank you for sharing this. Helped me out big time!