Fixing Worpress’ “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was doing some routine plugin update as a worpress admin when all of the sudden I got a white screen with a message saying:

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

Not only it looks ugly, it also did not let me do anything. The page didn’t load, I could not access the admin section. Nothing. I was locked out and my site was basically offline.

The fix seems easy enough though:

  1. Log in to your FTP
  2. Go to the root folder of your WordPress install.
  3. Find the “.maintenance” file.
  4. Delete the “.maintenance” file.

That’s it. You can now go back to your site, press F5 to refresh the page and rejoice as you see how everything went back to normal.