I just recovered from an issue with my WordPress automatic upgrade where the site only displayed the message:

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

Fixing it the hard way

After completely freaking out for about a minute, I followed the instructions on Updating Manually. Instead of using FTP I used the OSX Terminal and ssh to do most of the work directly on the server. I simply renamed the previous install folder, scp‘d the new version of WordPress and unzipped it. Once the site was up and running again with the content, themes, and plug-ins copied over and re-enabled, I was on my way to make an archive of the previous version when I found the culprit in the root of directory.

The offending file: .maintenance

Perhaps appropriately named and sitting there invisible next to .htaccess, here’s what the file contents looked like when I opened with pico:

< ?php $upgrading = 1307724895; ?>

After doing some Google-driven research, I found an article discussing WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin. Apparently, this is a feature baked into the application for making the site intentionally unavailable, and something in my upgrade process had failed to trigger its deletion.

Aside: for what it’s worth, there’s also good instructions on creating a custom design for this page in the support forums.

The easy solution

Remove .maintenance from the file system to put WordPress back into normal operation.

Have you ever worked with .maintenance before? Want to share any tips or tricks for working with ssh? Please post them in the comments below!