How the worlds most popular content management system was broken by an update to it’s most popular plugin.
As of June 2019, WordPress is used by 60.8% of all websites (whose content management system is known). That’s 27.5% of the top 10 million websites.
And Jetpack? That’s WordPress’ number one plugin, shipping as standard on many installations.
Yesterday, an update to Jetpack (v9.2) broke the WordPress admin, affecting everyone who either installed the update or, more worryingly, had it set to auto-update.
NOTE* My current WordPress version is WordPress 5.5.3.
I thought I’d share the solution: Downgrade to Jetpack 9.1
- First disable auto-updates for the plugin, otherwise your site will break again when it re-attempts to install Jetpack 9.2.
- Next, get Jetpack 9.1 from the following link: Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth
- From there, you should still be able to access your admin through recovery mode. You should have received an email on this. If not, contact your host.
- Now manually install v9.1. in Plugins, Add New, Upload.
- WordPress will now ask you if you wish to downgrade from 9.2. to 9.1. Yes to confirm.
- You should now be back in business.
- If you’re struggling with any of the above, get your hosting provider to do it, that’s what you’re paying them for after all!
So what now? Stay on Jetpack 9.1?
Automattic (Jetpack’s creators) themselves have promised imminent fixes and workarounds that seem to be working for some but not others. There’s also a big update to WordPress just around the corner in release 5.6. Here’s the full thread here:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/site-will-not-work-after-jetpack-plugin-update
For the time being, I think it’s safest to stick with v9.1.
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