What happens when you accidentally close the tab while WordPress installs an update

Your site gets stuck in Maintenance mode, and shows the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.” And the dashboard doesn’t work. Oh no.

Found out the hard way this morning that closing the tab while updating WordPress plugins gets your site stuck that way. Fortunately, after a bit of googling, I found out you can fix this by accessing your site’s root with an FTP client and deleting a file named “.maintenance”. Boom, fixed.