SharePoint Site is Read-only to Everyone: Including Farm Administrator, Site Collection Owner

Ever faced this odd problem? where SharePoint Site is read-only to every one.. Including Farm Administrator, Site Collection Administrator.. They would only have basic permissions & various OK buttons were greyed out.

This is because Sharepoint site collection/database into Read Only mode! To unlock the Sharepoint site either use the Central Admin Site quota page or stsadm.

Unlock a Site Collection through SharePoint Central Administration

Go to Application Management >> SharePoint Site Management >> Site collection quotas and locks >> Select the correct web application and site collection >> Set the lock status of the collection (it most likely will be set to “Read-only”, and you’ll need to move that radio button to “Not locked”).

Stsadm way to unlock a Site in SharePoint
stsadm -o -setsitelock -url http://teamsites.Crescent.com/sites/abc -lock None

That’s all!

Tail:  This may happen when the content Database is in read-only mode or in Single user Mode!

By the way, If you want to set a Site collection to Read-only you can use the above option. Just set the lock status to  “Read-only”.