Freak-Out Moment: Your Blog Is “Briefly Unavailable”
Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.
There are many freak-out moments in WordPress design and maintenance, and “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.” is one of them. Never run across this? Good! It just happened to me, for the first time in 4 years of heavy WP usage.
Whew. I was freaked out.
It’s easily fixed, though! Just delete the .maintenance file from your blog’s root directory.
Why does this thing exist and how could this have happened? WP has this cute little file to take care of visitors who come by while you’re doing and upgrade/update. If your update process is interrupted or interfered with, the .maintenance file may not get deleted automatically the way it should by the WP automatic core upgrade.
You can tell if your upgrade worked properly, other than the incident with the .maintenance file, by going to Tools, Upgrade and seeing if they say you need to upgrade to the latest version, or if you’re already all set. You’re probably fine. If not, just re-do the upgrade.
