mpersinger

I have had this exact same issue occur on several WP sites with W3TC. We run W3TC on about 100 WP sites. It does not occur on all sites. Just a few. Unsure why it happens on a few. But here is how I got past it.

1. Change permissions on .HTACCESS so the w3tc plugin doesn’t keep writing to the file and taking the site down. Remove all w3tc lines. Or just remove the problem line Public-Key-Pins
2. Delete the cache folder and w3tc-config folder completely in the wp-content folder. Perhaps these settings directories just need to be cleaned out and rebuilt from scratch. This would be the same as re installing the plugin. Just make sure to remove those folders completely.
3. Now you can run the w3tc plugin and adjust your settings. Double check everything. Turn off the security headers if you want.
4. Change permissions on .HTACCESS back to www-data. Let the plugin write to .HTACCESS

Now everything is working again with w3tc running.

Hello @vmarko

I see there is a new version of W3 Total Cache plugin released. Does this new version fix this known issue you said you were working on?

We have deactivated the plugin on about 50 WP sites so far. I know you sent a fix, much appreciated, but with so many sites we are waiting for a plugin release and don’t want custom work on each site.

Thanks
Monte

Hello,

I’m not sure why this topic is listed as Resolved? It sounds like there will be a Bug Fix released for W3 Total Cache but nothing has been released yet. Is that correct?

We run W3 Total Cache on all of our sites and I have this error on 10 WP sites now.

Fatal error: Uncaught W3TC\Util_WpFile_FilesystemOperationException

I could not roll back the plugin I had to deactivate W3 Total Cache to get past this issue.

Thanks
Monte

Hello @gabturkey

The recovery link is generated by WordPress when an error occurs. I don’t know of any way to re generate it. But if your site continues to throw errors it should send out another recovery email.

If you are locked out of wordpress you could rename the plugins/ directory to plugins2/ via FTP access. This will deactivate all plugins on the site. Once you get logged in just rename the directory back to plugins/ and then start activating plugins until you figure out the problem.

Sometimes it is helpful to turn Debug = True in your wp-config.php file. This will show you some errors.

If there are issues with Elementor plugin I would submit those error messages to Elementor support.

Monte

-Sometimes if you just reload the error pages a few times it resolves itself.

-Or if you change the URL in the address bar and change it back to /wp-admin/ and reload sometimes the dashboard admin page will reload.

-Or if you click the back button and reload sometimes you can get to the admin dashboard and past the error screen.

Most of the time I can do the 3 things above and still get to the WP admin dashboard even though there is some kind of WP error.

If none of these things work you would need to deactivate all of the plugins to get it to load normally. You can do that by renaming the plugin directory to plugin2 or whatever.

I pulled up your link and the site was working fine for me.

In cases like this I would look at the server error logs to see what the problem is. Most likely it is a Theme issue or plugin issue.

You could also deactivate all plugins and test.

I don’t think you really need the email link to fix it and get logged into WordPress admin.

Sometimes I login, get the error, then just switch my URL to website.com/wp-admin/ and refreash reload and I get logged in.

Sometimes I rename the plugins directory to plugins2 and login. This deactivates every WordPress plugin and you can login.

It is normally a plugin issue. One plugin on your site that is causing issues. The Apache error log or Nginx error log should tell you what the problem is.

Sometimes if you are able to login to the WordPress admin, and you get directed to an error page again, if you just go up to your address bar and change your URL to /wp-admin/ the dashboard will load. Sometimes it is cached or chrome is cached.

The plugin trick works. Re name plugin directory to plugins2 or whatever. That will force WP to deactivate all plugins and then you can login. Then switch plugins2 back to plugins and you can enable your plugins again. And try to figure out which one caused the issue.

The other issue we have seen is some wordpress sites won’t run on PHP7 and you get these error messages and can’t login. If your server uses php-fpm you can ask your host to run your site on PHP 5.4 or whatever older version of PHP so that you can login and fix your site.

If this issue keeps happening you really need to look at your Error log and it will tell you which plugin is the problem and you can delete or re name the plugin via FTP access and then should be able to login. Normally what I see is one plugin causing the problem and the plugin can be identified by looking at the error log.

we manage a couple hundred wordpress sites and this new feature is causing us a lot of pain. The admin email a lot of times is not set to us. So we are getting locked out of wordpress. We are running on PHP 7.3 and it is likely a plugin issue with PHP 7.3 but the error log files are not giving us any clues because we can’t get into the admin which would generate some error log files normally.

If you are trying to get the email link you can just add this to the end of your wordpress domain name:
/wp-login.php?action=entered_recovery_mode

The email link is just a simple link with that added to the end of it.

I’ve noticed a lot of cache issues with chrome as well. If you end up at wp-login.php page and site won’t load try switching your URL to /wp-admin/

The plugin trick works. Re name plugin directory to plugins2 or whatever. That will force WP to deactivate all plugins and then you can login. Then switch plugins2 back to plugins and you can enable your plugins again. And try to figure out which one caused the issue.

Same problem for me. WPS Hide Login plugins works great. But if I want to have a simple WordPress password protected page, I get a 404 not found error. If I disable WPS Hide Login plugin password protected pages in WordPress work. Is there any fix for this? Would a 301 redirect work?

Thanks!
Monte

This definitely looks like the culprit good find on this one thank you
https://blog.sucuri.net/2017/02/content-injection-vulnerability-wordpress-rest-api.html

The only WP sites I have seen this hack on are running 4.7.0 or 4.7.1. 4.7.2 resolves the vulnerability. Sounds like the hack was created by the release of 4.7

I have seen this happen on two different WordPress sites now. I also can find no modified files or malicious code. Sucuri scan is clean, including a paid server side sucuri scan. I think this is either a user account password that was hacked or wordpress software update fix. Both sites were running 4.7.1 but not 4.7.2.

I think you should change all of your user account passwords and update wordpress software and plugins. Run a sucuri scan and make sure wordpress security plugin is configured.

Thanks for the help I had the same issue and now it is fixed. It was definitely W3 Total Cache causing the issue. Every time I upgraded WordPress to 4.7 it would run halfway thru the updates and then choke on the database upgrade and throw this error

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_cache_get() in /wp-includes/option.php on line 1123, referer: /wp-admin/upgrade.php?step=upgrade_db

I tried deactivating W3TC and upgrading but same result. Admin will not load. Frontend working normal but admin stuck and won’t load.

As soon as I deleted /wp-content/w3tc-config/ everything started working again.
I didn’t have to remove W3TC all I had to do was delete this one directory. After I got everything upgraded I turned W3TC back on and had no problems.