Jetpack took down my site

WordPress 6.1: Jetpack just killed my site

It’s somewhat unsettling to log into your site following a patch (in this case WordPress 6.1) and find it’s crashed. All the other sites I checked look fine, so its not as simple as ‘this’ killed my site. Fortunately, I can go through the control panel to disable plug-ins (usually the cause) and find the offending culprit. To my surprise the cause was Automattic’s own Jetpack! J’accuse!

And I’m not the only one, the comments are already adding up over at WordPress.org: Jetpack (11.5) Fatal error

The authors were in the thread quickly enough and is one definitely bug relating to WAF and IP addresses and maybe several others affecting fewer people. The quick fix is to simply uninstall and reinstall Jetpack, which certainly worked for me. If you are on manual updates and still on 11.4, you might want to hold on for the fix: 11.5.1.

Plugin Authorsdixon194 (@sdixon194)
15 hours, 22 minutes ago

Hey folks, thanks for all the reports! We’ll be conducting a point release, Jetpack 11.5.1 to address this within the next 24 hours.

The tldr is that the Firewall module (waf) autogenerates some files for the IP block/allow list that are getting removed in the upgrade and then missing when Jetpack looks for them later.

As some folks have mentioned, simply removing and re-installing Jetpack 11.5 will fix the issue in the meanwhile. If your site is down after upgrading, you can also try toggling the WAF module which should regenerate the needed files by using the WP CLI: wp jetpack module deactivate waf and then wp jetpack module activate waf.

Apologies for the disruption with this release.

WP-CLI fix option

I didn’t need to try this, but apparently it works if you have this option and not others (such as deleting the jetpack directory)

Found in the same thread:

Gagan Deep Singh (@gagan0123)
3 hours, 40 minutes ago
@warnapura

If you have wp-cli on the server, this command can be used

wp plugin deactivate jetpack

Though if you still want to keep the plugin activated, you can run

wp plugin install –force jetpack

This took care of the issue for the sites on my server.