If you’ve never had to ponder doomsday scenarios for your website when the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” shows up on the screen where your handcrafted, artisinal content once displayed, count yourself lucky.
This has happened to me on numerous occasions, usually after an update of some sort.
Should you re-upload WordPress? Re-upload your theme? Call for help? Drink?
You may elect to imbibe for your personal pleasure, but none of these are otherwise necessary. This problem is a common one for self-hosted WordPress users and it takes two seconds to resolve.
First you need to get into your ftp files. I use FileZilla to do this, but there are a lot of other clients that do this (GoDaddy has a web-based solution for this). Once into the base files (they should be the first set of files you see), there will be a file named “.maintenance.” Delete it. If you haven’t done anything with your files in an ftp client this may seem scary, but this is a completely superfluous file and is fine to delete.
Once you delete the file your site will be restored to its previous glory. And that’s it.
If you encounter this I hope it solved your problem and that you handled it a lot better than I did when it first happened to me. 