The error
When I update a plugin in WordPress, the page says “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” and I can’t go back.
Error Logs
The error log was like this. It seems that the plugin upgrade failed.
157.7.85.160 - - [01/Feb/2026:01:58:38 +0000] "GET /wp-admin/update.php?action=update-selected&plugins=jetpack%2Fjetpack.php%2Cpost-smtp%2Fpostman-smtp.php%2Cultimate-addons-for-gutenberg%2Fultimate-addons-for-gutenberg.php%2Cwp-mail-smtp%2Fwp_mail_smtp.php&_wpnonce=ab6d361426 HTTP/1.1" 200 4216 "https://xxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.com/wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-plugin-upgrade" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/144.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
157.7.85.160 - - [01/Feb/2026:01:58:47 +0000] "GET /wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-plugin-upgrade HTTP/1.1" 503 2791 "https://xxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.com/wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-plugin-upgrade" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/144.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"How I dealt with
WordPress is stuck in “maintenance mode (.maintenance)”. There should be a file called .maintenance remaining in the root of WordPress (the level where wp-admin and wp-content are located), so delete it.
Since I am using k8s,
rm /var/snap/microk8s/common/default-storage/wordpress-wordpress-storage/.maintenance