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

I just updated one of my WordPress blogs to the latest version available, directly from the WP admin panel. After hitting the “please update now” link, I was quickly presented this message: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

For the first minute or so I thought WordPress was working in the background and that my site would be back up in a couple minutes. But 5 minutes later, it was still displaying this message. I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t worrying…

After doing a little bit of research, I found this post on WP forums that explained how to get rid of this issue. Basically, all you have to do is get root access to your domain and simply delete the .maintenance file that was created.

This .maintenance file might be hidden, depending on what FTP client you’re using. Just make sure you choose to show hidden files, somewhere in your client’s settings.

As soon as I deleted the .maintenance file, my WP blog was back on track, and had been updated to the latest version of WordPress.

Hope this little trick will help some of you.