Jetpack 4.8 renders site unavailable

And EXTRA upset that I can’t get support requests in. I have been a WordPress user from the beginning with the same account and I have to be verified for support???

An additional update is that I have two sites on the same server. One was unusable and the other updated just fine.

I had a similar problem and it seemed to be tied to sitemaps. Not sure if it’s a complication with another plugin, but I reverted back to 4.7.1, then logged in and turned off sitemaps. After that, I upgraded to 4.8 again and so far everything is working normally again.

Sorry about that! We’ve made some changes to the Sitemaps feature in Jetpack 4.8, and inadvertently used code that isn’t compatible with old versions of PHP (PHP 5.3 or less). If you get Fatal errors when using Jetpack’s Sitemaps module on yur site, that’s most likely what’s causing the issue.

We’ll release a new update to solve that problem, but until then I’m afraid I can only recommend the following:

1. Contact your hosting provider and ask them if it is possible for you to use a more recent version of PHP. PHP 7 is the recommended version of PHP for WordPress, so if they can update you to PHP 7 that would be great.
2. Remove the Jetpack plugin from your site until we release an update.
3. Force Deactivate the Sitemaps module by installing this must-use plugin on your site. You can do so by following the instructions in the file.

Really sorry for all the trouble!

I’ll post again here once I have more news.

And EXTRA upset that I can’t get support requests in. I have been a WordPress user from the beginning with the same account and I have to be verified for support???

I’m not quite sure what you mean. Did you have trouble posting here, or sending us an email via this form?

Hi Jeremy. The trouble I had was the delay for approval of the post. I guess that’s a new addition. Posts now seem to be going in right away so maybe it was just a result of me not having posted here in a while!

@farlane Oh, I don’t have control over how threads get approved, I’m not exactly sure how that works. I know there are anti-spam measures that sometimes hold threads that include many links, but that wasn’t the case with your post here. If that happens again, don’t hesitate to contact the forum moderators via Chat here:

Slack

Back to our original problem, you’ll be happy to hear that we just released 4.8.1 to solve the issue. You can read more about this release here:
https://wp.me/p1moTy-4N5

Please update to 4.8.1 as soon as possible to see if that fixes that issue for you. Also, if you’re using WP Rocket, please update that to the latest version as well.

If you continue to experience issues, could you please try to delete the Jetpack plugin, and reinstall it from scratch? If that doesn’t help either, could you give me as much information as possible about the errors you see on your sites?

Thank you, and again, sorry for the trouble! While we do our best to test things prior to release, sometimes things fall through the cracks. We’ve added additional measures to make sure this type of error doesn’t happen again.

Gotcha. Is there a thread or guide somewhere for reconnecting EXISTING installs of Jetpack on sites where we deleted the plugin to restore functionality? With 40+ sites crashed we had no choice but to delete.

I want to preserve all of the statistics for my clients if at all possible, as well as any CSS and other settings.

@farlane As soon as you reinstall Jetpack and reconnect to WordPress.com, all settings should be back. As long as the site URL doesn’t change you’ll get all the settings saved on WordPress.com for that site, like Stats. CSS, on the other hand, is handled by WordPress itself now, since WordPress 4.7.

There is no way to reconnect sites to WordPress.com on bulk, though, since one needs to agree to the WordPress.com terms or service when connecting.