Wordpress 5.0 Error 500?

I’m starting to see a lot of HTTP Error 500 issues with a particular kind of wordpress sites, and I think the autoupdate to 5.0 that ran back in December is the culprit, but I’m not sure.

When folks have installed multiple instances of WP within the same directory

e.g.,

mysite.bergbuilds.domains (WP instance 1)
mysite.bergbuilds.domains/blog/ (WP instance 2)

the site that lives within the /blog/ directory now throws the HTTP 500 error. No access to /wp-admin/ either.

This has never been a recommended practice, and I’ve tried to help folks migrate to a subdomain when I’ve caught it. On the other hand, it generally still worked. Now, it doesn’t.

Is this likely fallout from the 5.0 update as I suspect, or am I being goofy about that? Has anyone else seen this issue? Most importantly, any suggestions for how I can correct this for ~ 20 sites here without losing peoples’ work?

I would have a look at this guide and start by determining if there is a common plugin or theme that might be at fault https://workshop.reclaimhosting.com/supporting-dooo/http-error-500/. It’s always a possibility that a plugin or theme was not ready and the update broke the site (for example we’ve seen several folks that had broken sites as a result of the Aesop Story Engine plugin which did finally issue an update but after sites were already throwing errors). One other possibility if there were disk space issues I’ve seen where Installatron starts the update, runs out of space, and the whole thing craps out. Sometimes giving an account more space and then pushing the update through again will work. Feel free to DM or put in a ticket on any particularly problematic sites and we can take a look, but given 5.0 came early December I can definitely say we haven’t had widespread failures, just more one-off issues here and there that are pretty common with any major WP update.

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