"update has failed" message won't go away

[steevithak]

After running a routine plugin update, the site became inaccessible for a few minutes with a blank white page saying "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute." After approximately four minutes, the site became accessible again but the admin pages now show the message "An automated WordPress update has failed to complete - please attempt the update again now."

The words "please attempt the update again now" are a link to /wp-admin/update-core.php

Clicking the link has no effect, it simply reloads the page and the message is still there. It seems like this means one of two things: 1) there is no update that needs to be re-attempted, in which case the update software should realize that and remove the message - or 2) there really is an update needing to be installed and failing, in which case the error message should give the user some additional information (what plugin specifically is it that needs the update? what specifically is the reason it failed? etc).

Any suggestions on how to debug this problem and remove the persistent error message?

[swissspidy]

From the docs in maintenance_nag(), the function responsible for that message:

If an update failed critically, we may have copied over version.php but not other files.
In that case, if the install claims we're running the version we attempted, nag.
This is serious enough to err on the side of nagging.

If we simply failed to update before we tried to copy any files, then assume things are
OK if they are now running the latest.

This flag is cleared whenever a successful update occurs using Core_Upgrader.

Re-running the core update should fix this.

[steevithak]

How does one "re-run the core update"? As noted above, the error message links to /wp-admin/update-core.php and I tried that repeatedly but it didn't fix the error.

I eventually found several forum discussions on other sites that recommended as a fix removing a file called .maintenance from the wordpress document root directory. I tried this and it worked for me. Everything seems to be fine again. The theory in the forum was that certain kinds of network timeouts during an update trigger a wordpress bug that causes the program to leave a spurious .maintenance file lying around and that results in the incorrect error message.

[mgparisi]

I also have this issue. Latest version of Wordpress

[SergeyBiryukov]

Thanks for the report, we're already tracking this issue in #14028.