How to fix “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” error on WordPress?

Hello, friends. If you have a WordPress site, you will know that sometimes some unwanted errors occur that can give us a headache. So, the error in question is “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” on WordPress. Let’s take a look at it.

Why does this error happen?

There can be many reasons why this error happens, however, in my experience, it was with a failed update of one of the themes. From then on, I frequently got this error.

However, other causes can be:

• Low memory
• compatibility problems between plugins or themes
• An update stopped without being completed (my case)
• Or simply external problems affecting the server, such as saturation.

Of course, remember that WordPress is constantly monitoring the server for updates and so on, so it’s not malicious. During some processes, a .maintenace file is created that blocks the site from running.

The issue is that even after finishing the update or maintenance, you still get this page.

There it is obvious that there are maintenance tasks running, but after a while, the error still occurs.

How to fix “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” error on WordPress

There are several ways to fix them, but they depend on the WordPress provider you have. However, I will present a generic solution that you can use on any system, regardless of the provider.

To achieve this, connect via SSH to the hosted server. Verify that it is up-to-date to avoid issues.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade           # For Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives
sudo dnf update                                                     # For RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, Alma Linux and Rocky Linux
sudo zypper up                                                       # For OpenSUSE

Now, go to the WordPress root directory. For example, /var/www/html/wordpress/

cd /var/www/html/wordpress/`.

And delete the .maintenance file that is generated when WordPress recognizes that there is a maintenance task.

sudo rm .maintenance

This is enough, now refresh your WordPress site, and it should be working.

Conclusion

Fixing WordPress errors is important to manage a site. Now you know how to remove this annoying error that can scare you in your daily work.