How To Fix Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance Mode Timeout

I received this email from a client recently after uploading a modified theme i had completed work on:

How do I get back into the admin to activate the theme? When I try to login I get this message:

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

Here’s how i removed that message and got the site working again.

In the root directory of the installation i found a maintenance file named .maintenance which contained this code:

<?php $upgrading = time(); ?>

Here’s where i found the file in the installations root directory:

The file is added by WordPress when auto updating and the code executes maintenance mode displaying a page with the message

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

The Fix

Simply remove the .maintenance file from the root directory of your WordPress installation and your site will become accessible again.

When working on the site, i noticed the site was loading very slowly to the point it timed out when installing a small child theme and plugin. The reason for this is maybe the site is hosted on a very cheap shared hosting which may have reached its limit of allowed resources. Maybe because all the sites on that server where auto updating at the same time.