Clear “Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance” Message

 

Just finished redesigning my web site and along came an update from WordPress, so without thinking and without doing a backup, I clicked on the link to do an automatic upgrade. I know, I should always do a backup first but normally everything proceeds without a problem. Not this time. A blank screen but for the words, “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. So I waited a few minutes, logged on again, both as a visitor and administrator, but the message persisted. Every had that sinking feeling?

Cause of the Maintenance Message

Luckily this is not a major problem once you know the solution. When doing an automatic upgrade, a feature added with WordPress Version 2.7, WordPress places a file named “.maintenance” in the blog base folder (the root directory) of your WordPress installation. This is the same folder where wp-config.php is stored. If the file “.maintenance” exists, then everyone visiting the web site will see the, “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” message.

This was done to prevent visitors from seeing possibly broken pages during the upgrade process. An excellent idea and a great built-in feature, but if the upgrade is interrupted or fails for any reason the file doesn’t get deleted and everybody is excluded from access to your blog, including the administrator, i.e. you.

Removing the Maintenance Message

To stop the maintenance message being displayed all you have to do is delete the “.maintenance” file and your blog should return to normal. WordPress recommends that you repeat the automatic upgrade just in case it failed and left a few loose ends. If you see the notification on the dashboard page stating a new version of WordPress is available you should definitely repeat the automatic upgrade.

Well, that solved the problem for me. I hope, should the occasion arise it solves the problem for you as well.