Drupal 7 not able to run cron after views/panels update

Question

After an update of several modules to their latest versions (views, panels, ctools) it seems Drupal can no longer run cron, whether automatically or manual. It gives the error: "Cron run failed."

I have no idea what might be causing this and only discovered it some 10 days after performing the updates. The lightweight cron (for scheduled content) that I have set up externally in cpanel still runs.

Also a bit worrying is, when visiting mywebstie.com/cron.php (as an anon) it shows me my actual frontpage with some broken css. Which, I believe, is an unintended behaviour as it should show a blank page or a "content not found" page.

I believe the number 1 suspect is the views module, since immediately after the update I noticed that admin/content view no longer updates the "node views today" value and it just continuously increments this value without reinitialising every 24hours.

Any ideas of what might be the issue here?

Everthing was normal before the said updates: I have Unix server using Centos. BTW I have a local copy of the site using Xampp and it has the same cron problem as the live site. I am inclined to believe this is not a server problem.

PS: I have never used drush..

Answer 1

For troubleshooting cron.php problems found this:

https://www.drupal.org/node/553430

Cron stopped running; logs say: "Attempting to re-run cron while it is already running."

I have been able to trigger cron using the ultimate cron module, which is in beta.

Still don't understand what was going and didn't find the faulty module but the "attempting to re-run cron while it's already running" error msg has gone away from the logs.