Deactivating Jetpack Protect Crashes Website

Hello Kevin, I’m very sorry to hear that Protect is not deactivating properly and would be very happy to help you get things back up and running!

1. Do you have access to the PHP error logs on your website? This would give us a clear indication of where the problem is occurring and how to go about fixing it.
2. Were you using Jetpack Protect’s Firewall feature, and if so, did you at any point configure it to run in “standalone” mode? This would have required some technical actions by yourself or your web host. If this was the case, it is possible your server is still configured to be running scripts from Protect, and may cause issues if the plugin was removed:

Enhanced protection
Learn how you can execute Jetpack Firewall before WordPress initializes. This mode offers the most protection.

To ensure the firewall can best protect your site, please update: auto_prepend_file PHP directive to point to wp-content/jetpack-waf/bootstrap.php Typically this is set either in an .htaccess file or in the global PHP configuration; contact your host for further assistance.

Don’t forget to undo this action when Firewall is turned off, or when you uninstall Jetpack.

Please let me know about the above, and I will continue to investigate this in the meantime!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by njweller. Reason: Added more information

Hello @njweller and thank you for the reply. To answer your questions:

1. Yes – I do have access to the php error logs, and looked in the public_html directory at the error.log and did not see anything in there relating to the problem. If you would like to see any other log please let me know which one specifically. I run the hosting server that the sites are on and can provide any of them you need.
2. I was actually using jetpack-protect through the MainWP plugin. Not sure if that makes a difference, but it installed jetpack-protect on all of my websites. I started noticing small errors and recently a major issue with the latest update to Woocommerce. So much so, that I went to start disabling plugins one at a time to find which was causing the issue and narrowed it down to jetpack-protect.

I set the debug to true in wordpress to see if any additional errors would show, but nothing other than showing there are numerous php errors. I checked most of them and nothing is specific enough to narrow down. I tested 2 other websites by simply clicking on “deactivate” for the jetpack-protect plugin and both instantly went down and were not recoverable – so I am 100% that is the issue. Again, not sure if it matters that it was initially installed by MainWP or not.

Please let me know what else you need or what I can do to get the websites back up. Even restoring one website still leaves it with the same issue since it is putting the plugin back on, and again it goes down with errors once deactivated.

Please help!

Hello Kevin,

I’ve been working to try and reproduce this behavior with the latest versions of MainWP Dashboard/Child, Jetpack Protect, and WooCommerce without any luck so far. I see that your site is back up online with Jetpack disconnected, were you able to resolve the issue on your end?

Hello @kevinstan,

It’s been one week since this topic was last updated. I’m going to mark this thread as solved. If you have any further questions or need more help, you’re welcome to open another thread here. Cheers!