"Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance"

Your posts and pages are safe. While the message shows, WordPress sends a 503 error (the code for "temporarily unavailable") and asks search engines to come back in 10 minutes.

What you'll see

Everyone, you included

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute. It shows on the login page too, so you can't get into the admin while it's up.

A designed "maintenance" page instead

WordPress lets a site swap this plain message for its own page (a file called maintenance.php in the wp-content folder). It means the same thing. A "coming soon" page from a plugin is different: that plugin stays on until someone turns it off.

In the admin, afterwards

An automated WordPress update has failed to complete - please attempt the update again now. WordPress's own update of itself didn't finish. Click the link and run it again.

If you're visiting a site

The site is in the middle of an update, and nothing is wrong with your phone or computer. Wait 10 minutes and reload. If it's still there after that, the owner may not know: phone them or use another way to reach them.

If it's your site

When WordPress updates itself, or a plugin or theme you use, it puts a small file called .maintenance in the site's main folder and deletes it when it's done. If the update is interrupted, the file can be left behind. WordPress ignores that file once it's 10 minutes old, so most of the time the site comes back by itself.

1. Wait until 10 minutes after the update started, then open the site in a private (incognito) window.
2. Log in and go to Dashboard › Updates. If a plugin, theme or WordPress itself is still listed there, the update didn't finish. Update it again, one item at a time.
3. Go to Plugins and check nothing you rely on is switched off.
4. Open your home page and one or two busy pages. If you see "There has been a critical error on this website", the update broke something: see the critical error guide.

Fix it the same day: until it's sorted, every visitor sees the message or a half-finished update.

If it's still there after 10 minutes

WordPress doesn't normally show it for this long, so something else needs a look. WordPress's own advice is to delete the .maintenance file from the site's main folder. You'll need the hosting file manager or FTP for that, so ask your web host or web person. It's a hidden file (its name starts with a dot), so they may need to turn on "show hidden files" to see it.

Once it's gone, go back to the steps above: the update that left it behind may not have finished.

Check it from outside

Site health loads your home page the way a visitor would. While the message is up, it says your home page didn't load and shows the 503. Site Watch checks once a night and emails you if your home page stops loading, so it catches the message only if it's still stuck when we check.