Fatal error w/ latest version

Dear amazing simple history team, First – I just wanted to thank you all for one of the best plugins, you have made a wonderfully helpful tool that we recommend for our clients. So thank you all again. Next – I’m sure you’re on this but if not – I just wanted to report that we’ve been seeing fatal errors across a few of our sites that have attempted to auto-update to the latest version: Some plugins have failed to update Please check your site now. It’s possible that everything is working. If there are updates available, you should update. The following plugins failed to update. If there was a fatal error in the update, the previously installed version has been restored. - Simple History (from version 5.20.0 to 5.22.0) : https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-history/ Thanks for the report @tison_ You did not get any chance to view more details about the error? Perhaps something in the error log or in the admin email that sometimes is sent when errors occur? I did get this report recently and I wonder if it’s the same problem. Any chance you would provide me with some more info, like php version, server setup, active plugins? @eskapism – I just received another notification (about 13 mins ago) saying the same message (upgrading from 5.20 to 5.22 failed to update), and looking in the logs I don’t see any fatal errors in the logs hmm. @hpjbw – thank you for this additional info, very helpful. To add to HP’s note – we are on WP 6.9 (and still encountered the failed upgrade today), Thank you for the help Pär, T Thanks @tison_ for the follow up. This looks like an issue that only happens on WPEngine. That fact makes it a bit difficult to reproduce and to test solutions as I don’t have any WPEngine account myself. I have however done some research and found other similar problems that other plugins have had. Maybe it’s an issue with their opcache solution. I will make some changes in the next version and see if anything helps 🤞. @eskapism A quick update – this was posted by @etling who is also on wpengine: “Also on WPEngine and also got this error. Here is an error log immediately after the upgrade if this helps, although it looks the same as previous posters h ave shared. +1 to what others said, thanks for a wonderful plugin @eskapism ”: "PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class ""Simple_History\Channels\Channels\File_Channel"" not found in [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/channels/class-channels-manager.php:50#012Stack trace:#012#0 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/channels/class-channels-manager.php(37): Simple_History\Channels\Channels_Manager->register_core_channels()#012#1 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/services/class-channels-service.php(29): Simple_History\Channels\Channels_Manager->loaded()#012#2 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/class-simple-history.php(263): Simple_History\Services\Channels_Service->loaded()#012#3 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/class-simple-history.php(212): Simple_History\Simple_History->load_service('Simple_History\\...')#012#4 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/class-simple-history.php(123): Simple_History\Simple_History->load_services()#012#5 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/class-simple-history.php(102): Simple_History\Simple_History->init()#012#6 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/class-simple-history.php(292): Simple_History\Simple_History->__construct()#012#7 [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/index.php(118): Simple_History\Simple_History::get_instance()#012#8 [...]/wp-settings.php(545): include_once('/nas/content/li...')#012#9 [...]/wp-config.php(121): require_once('/nas/content/li...')#012#10 [...]/wp-load.php(50): require_once('/nas/content/li...')#012#11 [...]/wp-blog-header.php(13): require_once('/nas/content/li...')#012#12 [...]/index.php(17): require('/nas/content/li...')#012#13 {main}#012 thrown in [...]/wp-content/plugins/simple-history/inc/channels/class-channels-manager.php on line 50","Wed Jan 07 2026 11:11:43 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)" "Simple History updated to 5.22.0","Wed Jan 07 2026 11:11:39 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)" Quick update about this: I have really tried to identify what could cause this, but still no success. A lot of users have successfully updated to this new version, so it works…for most users. So there must be some kind of combination of WP Engine as the hosting provider and some of their plugins. I will keep trying to find the issue but without being able to reproduce it, it’s kinda difficult :/. Pär @eskapism , We just updated to the latest manually so I’ll let you know if it arises again (no issues so far). Thank you for your help, T @eskapism , My friend, we upgraded last week and the auto-upgrade this week caused another fail error: The following plugins failed to update. If there was a fatal error in the update, the previously installed version has been restored. - Simple History (from version 5.22.0 to 5.23.0) : https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-history/ Can I help you troubleshoot this in anyway? @eskapism – Ok now we’re getting the error on all of our sites on wpengine, so I’m getting 20-40 alerts per day now that the upgrade is failing. So this is becoming a larger issue for us now. Have you any idea how we can fix it? Or patch it? Please let me know if I can do anything to help. @garrettdigital thank you for the add’l info Sorry everyone that still has this issue. It has been really difficult to debug, probably due to the fact that it seems to be triggered during update and not if the plugin is installed at a specific version. This took a while to understand… @etling thanks a lot! I think you are on to something. I thought the issue was with autoloading or namespaces error for an installed version, but the errors seem to happen only during update, where a PHP script has loaded one set of files and checked some dirs for files, but then during this request the folders and files are changed (added, moved, deleted) and at the end of the script the “update done” hook is triggered and there is an error due to the plugin looking for files at wrong places due to opcache or cache or similar! In the next version I will add “stubs” at the old locations, so old plugin in memory will still be able to load it’s old files, even when they are moved. Not sure if you follow, but I think think would be a solution that work work. I will try to release a new version this weekend! Please try version 5.23.1 and let me know if it works. If you encounter an error please let me know from what version you updated and on what screen you get the error. Screenshots are useful! @eskapism – Ok so far – no alerts on plugins failing since you made this update (which is good I had been getting them every few hours), so I’ll update you if I see any more! Thank you so much! We will continue to highly recommend your work!