This morning my WordPress blog dutifully informed me that I should update to the most current version and would I like to do it automatically? Well, as is my typical response, I clicked the automated update and let it go. Usually, I am met with another screen that informs me of the progress and the ultimate result, fully updated, within a few seconds.
This time, I got something else.
Briefly unavailable for Scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute
That is what I got and I didn’t know what it meant. Was my hosting company down? Did my update fail? No idea.
After checking another site on the same machine, I knew it was not the hosting company. It had to be WordPress. So, I quickly searched for the error in Google and came up with a result. A faulty upgrade. Oops.
In order to fix it, you need to delete a file named ‘.maintenance’ from your main blog folder. I also read some folks being unable to find the file because it is hidden. You may not be aware, but file prepended with a dot (.) are read by file systems as hidden and typically not shown to the user. Thankfully, you can see them by changing a setting in your OS or in my case, an FTP client. I use Transmit and all I had to do was go to the “View->Show Invisible Files setting” and voila, I could see the ‘.maintenance’ file. I deleted it and my blog came back to life.
Morale of the story? Even WordPress can have a faulty update. Thankfully, they are very few and far between.
