WordPress 5.6.1-alpha-49778 update

[freedomlock2011]

Since the WordPress updated that just applied to my online store was applied I have received a good 100 emails letting me know it upgraded. I get an email every 1-2 minutes.

[freedomlock2011]

Multiple emails of the same update

[freedomlock2011]

Another email

[iandunn]

Hi @freedomlock2011, thanks for letting us know, I'm sorry that happened, that's really annoying :(

Are you still getting the emails?

Do you know what version of WP you had before the upgrade? If it was a stable version like 5.5.3, then I'm guessing this problem is related to ​the `5.6 vs 5.6.1-alpha` bug, which is fixed now.

[dd32]

Hey @freedomlock2011,

The emails should have now stopped, as your site has updated correctly to 5.6 now instead of staying on 5.6.1-alpha. The update to 5.6.1-alpha was unexpected and affected a minority of WordPress sites.

However, the emails you have received signify something else wrong, it appears that something is causing the WordPress upgrade routines to get triggered every minute, which should never happen under normal circumstances.

You're not alone, as amongst those who upgraded to 5.6.1-alpha quite a few other people have also experienced the same (or more) level of emails, it appears that it may be behaviour limited to a few specific web hosts, so I've reached out to a few contacts to see if we can find the cause (including one at your webhost).

If you're able to, are you able to share the contents of the cron option in your WordPress database? or let us know if there's anything being flagged in your Site Health tool in the WordPress dashboard?

[dd32]

In discussing with hosts, We've narrowed down the cause of the constant updates & emails.

It looks like some hosts systems were triggering wp_version_check() far more often than ideal, through their own systems (not WordPress cron) which was triggering development WordPress installs to constantly update themselves. So while WordPress would only trigger it every 12 hours, it was being triggered as often as every minute for some, through no fault of WordPress.

So, it doesn't appear there's any cron-related bugs here, just the API issue that caused this ticket to happen in the first place.

I'm going to close this ticket, as the issue is now fixed, @freedomlock2011 if you're still getting emails or updates are not working as expected, please reach out to me!
Sorry for the flood of emails you got, but thanks for reporting it since it's allowed me to stop it for others!