Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

Got that message? And you can’t view your blog neither login to admin area? And now you wish you didn’t click automatic upgrade link? No need to worry, we will fix it.

Before we fix it, we shoud know what is going on? WordPress, like other systems, is not perfect. Eventough it has automatic upgrade, it doesn’t mean your wordpress installation will always successfully upgraded using automatic upgrade. That’s why we should back up our blog before upgrading it. So, why that message appear? Does it mean our installation failed? Maybe. WordPress creates a file named .maintenance before upgrading process. Just in case there are visitors accessing your blog during upgrading process, they will see “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” message instead of your under-upgrading blog. Somehow, I don’t know exactly why, the file .maintenance is not deleted by WordPress. If this thing happens, you will see maintenance message.

So, how to fix it? It’s a piece of cake. Login to your web host using CPanel or SSH, remove the .maintenance file. You can find that file in your WordPress installation directory (the directory that has wp-admin directory – not inside wp-admin directory). After you do it, refresh your blog. We hope your blog will be back… :)

Question: I can’t see .maintenance file
Answer: Yes, it’s a hidden file. If you are using SSH try ls -a command. If you use CPanel, don’t forget to check show hidden files while opening your installation directory using file manager.

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1. Fixing WordPress 2.9 Upgrade Error
2. WordPress Error: open_basedir restriction in effect
3. WordPress.org Releases 2.8 Beta 1