Yoast SEO, the industry-leading SEO plugin, released version 17.9 update on January 11th, 2022. After updating the Yoast SEO plugin, an error occurred when publishing or updating a blog post. I just reverted it back to the previous version, which fixed the issue.
"Publishing failed" or "Updating failed" error after updating Yoast SEO to version 17.9
After updating Yoast SEO to version 17.9, posts could not be published or updated. When I tried to publish or update an article, the error message "Publishing failed" or "Updating failed" appeared.
However, the post was successfully published or updated in spite of the error message. Also, some plugins such as WP-Sweep did not work properly.
The issue did not take place when I disabled Yoast SEO. I chose to downgrade Yoast SEO to the previous version and the problem disappeared.
In Yoast SEO 17.9 update, multiple enhancements and bugfixes were made. Also, the compatibility with PHP 8.1 is improved by adding validations and handling deprecations.
When applying PHP 8.1 in Bluehost, WordPress sites with Yoast SEO did not work properly. Now, Yoast improved the compatibility with PHP 8.1 in version 17.9, WorPress sites with Yoast SEO will work fine I think.
Conclusion
If you have trouble in publishing or updating posts in WordPress with an error message "Publishing failed" or "Updating failed", you can suspect plugin conflict for the issue. Also, you can suspect low PHP Memory Limit value or other causes.