I am a huge fan of the automatic update functionality of WordPress. Thanks to this feature, my WorPress version and my plugins are now automatically updated at the click of a button. During an update, WordPress displays the message: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. Once the update is finished, the message goes away and your site goes back to normal.
The other day, I started an update and accidently refreshed the page, which broke my update and forced my site to get forever stuck at “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”.
Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to fix this. Whenever WorPress starts an update, it creates a file called .maintenance that is placed at the root directory of your WordPress installation. As long as this file exists, your site will be in maintenance mode and you will see the dreaded message: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. To fix the message, all you have to is delete this file and you are good to go. Keep in mind that, in most cases where you continuously see this message, the automatic update failed. So you will have to redo the update again.
