Error 503: Service Unavailable

[CoreyCole]

My Magento store was working fine yesterday, but when I logged in today I'm only getting a page reading:

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Same page for the admin panel.

As I read in this stackoverflow post the issue used to be solved by deleting a maintenance.flag file and possibly also deleting the cache and session folders, but I can't find a maintenance.flag file and deleting the var/cache folder didn't solve the issue.

I'm running the webstore on a virtualbox ubuntu apache2 server.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mazhalai]

@CoreyCole Thank you for reporting this issue, however the flag file is .maintenance.flag not maintenance.flag, note the extra dot at the beginning. Alternatively you can disable maintenance mode with CLI bin/magento maintenance:disable

[CoreyCole]

Thanks! I found the file it was in var/ not docroot like it used to be. Deleting it did the trick.

[jiamingstory]

I can't find the maintenance.flag file by my windows platform.

[mazhalai]

@Jeffery-Li Please open a new issue and refrain from commenting on closed issues. Re maintenance.flag, it has a . in the beginning, and perhaps it is hidden by default in windows?

[magenx]

it is hidden by default on every system, even with ftp client users can not see it.
i think you have to use normal file.

[nomuprive]

Hi. I'm having the same kind of problem but, my error message is a little different. I'm not sure is it's a file permission problem. Below is the error message:

"There has been an error processing your request
Unable to retrieve deployment version of static files from the file system."