I just now upgraded my other wordpress blogs to the latest released version 2.9.

And suddenly a page with the message “Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance. Check back in a minute” appeared. It never happened before with any of the upgrades. I thought the server is taking time to upgrade it.

I checked after 10 minutes and the message was still there. I was terribly frightened of the possibility of loosing all settings / plugins / theme customization and probably data too (though data might have been safe in mySql). I know we can rely on wordpress but its a software after all and anything is the possibility. Although, I myself never take backup before upgrading.

I immediately went to ftp to check if all the files were safe. They were safe. Huuuuh.

Anyways, you know the solution to the problem is damn simple. I did it myself within seconds.

Let’s know its cause first:

Cause

While automatic up-gradation, wordpress places a file in the blog root directory called “.maintenance” to prevent visitors from being confronted with broken pages during the upgrade process. But if the upgrade gets interrupted or fails for any reason, that file doesn’t get deleted and nobody can access the blog.

Fix

All you have to do is delete the “.maintenance” file from the blog root directory.  After you have deleted the file you should be able to access the site normally.

Of course, this fix assumes the blog upgrade failure was really because of minor unforeseen reasons like connection failure or directory right issue or something.

You may need to upgrade the wordpress again, just check the file details like creation date etc over ftp to check if upgrade has been done.

Hope it helps.

-NKJ

NitiN Kumar Jain

Nitin works in an IT MNC professionally but blogs and owns NKJ Live. He is also the co-owner of a professional start-up ARGHAM BYTES

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