Deactivating Maintenance Mode in Wordpress

I had an issue recently with my Wordpress blog where I was in the process of updating a couple of plugins and it failed to do so automatically, after a couple of tries I got impatient at one point while it was halfway through the process and I refreshed the page.

Unfortunately what happened as a result was that it returned a message saying "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute." I could no longer access the wp-admin section (or the blog itself) anymore because it was stuck in maintenance mode.

After a quick Google search I discovered the only way you can deactivate maintenance mode is by FTPing into the root of your website and deleting a file called ".maintenance".

It's a bit of a tricky one though as it is a hidden file. I use CoreFTP and at first I could not find this file. I discovered that with CoreFTP you have to right click on the folder and select Directory Commands > List Mode > Advanced.

Once I was able to see hidden files, I quickly found ".maintenance", deleted it, and my blog was out of maintenance mode. I'm not entire sure why the plugin update process failed in the first place though...