Recovering from a Failed Zombie Update

  • Jaiananda

    (@jaiananda)


    2 months ago

    I am conflicted on this plugin. I have used it before and had no issues but then it crashed on my clients site. Here is my breakdown of my extensive chat with AI about what happened & solution. Always test your fix on a staging site.

    The user (me) encountered a white screen and a redirect loop on their WordPress login page, which was caused by a corrupted caching plugin and damaged core files following a failed update. After bypassing the login screen via a backup service’s administrative tool (blogvault), the user diagnosed the issue on a staging environment where the “zombie” (W3 Total Cache) plugin configuration was causing system crashes. The problem was resolved on the live site by reinstalling the malfunctioning plugin to restore its missing files, performing a clean deletion to remove residual configuration, and finally reinstalling the WordPress core software to repair the corrupted login files.

    It was messy and took up my valuable time diagnosing and fixing the issue. The fix was easy but getting to it took many hours since as a developer I don’t want to break my client’s site.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Marko Vasiljevic

    (@vmarko)

    1 month, 3 weeks ago

    Hi @jaiananda — thank you for the detailed and honest write-up. We’re really sorry you had to go through that, especially on a live site. We know how stressful that is.

    Since WordPress handles the core update process, it’s difficult for us to see exactly where things failed without more detail. We’d genuinely like to dig into this with you.

    If you’re willing, could you share:

    • Which plugin files were missing or corrupted?
    • Any specific error messages you saw?
    • Anything from your PHP or server error logs around the time of the update?

      We’re very happy to investigate and help — we just need a bit more information to understand what happened and prevent it in the future.

      Thanks again for taking the time to report this.
Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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