Failed WordPress Updates

Someone on Twitter had a problem updating her WordPress installation to 2.8.4. You know, there is a security update (yes, I know… the 4th one in almost as many weeks since 2.8 was released).

Anyway, she kept on encountering this problem, even after the upgrade seemed to complete:
An automated WordPress update has failed to complete - please attempt the update again now.

My normal recommendations are to:

1. Deactivate all Plugins before upgrading
2. Install the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin & use it instead

One of those to usually works, but in this case she was stuck.

So after a bit of research, I found that WordPress creates a file called .maintenance. This is the file that puts WordPress into maintenance mode. “Maintenance mode” keeps your blog visitors from seeing all the nastiness and broken pages when you run an upgrade.

This file sometimes may not get deleted properly which forces that message to display in your Admin screen.

To remedy this, simply log into your FTP, go to the root, or the base directory where you installed WordPress. Locate the file named .maintenance and delete it.

Log back into your WordPress admin & everything should be fine.

This should take care of it. If not, I really really hope you backed up your site before upgrading!
photo credit: Tweek