Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.

Oh the horror.

A couple of days ago something happened while updating one of my sites. “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.” was all that the page told me.

How to fix that? Noting that the page in question is made with WordPress?

Log on to the server serving your page. Delete the file “.maintenance”. Log out. Refresh.

If that doesn’t help, you have bigger problems.

Why is it happening? When you update something on a wordpress site, the site is placed in maintenance mode. It’s a bad idea to have people entering comments into the database at the same time you’re doing maintenance on it.

The site is placed in maintenance mode – every request for the site is given the messange “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance”. And that is controlled by the file “.maintenance”. Normally that file will be deleted when the update or whatever is over. If something goes wrong, it survives. Everything went fine, but the file is still there, and your site is unavailable.