Government takes 32 services offline as 'millions of sites impacted by PHP vulnerabilities'

Government takes 32 services offline as 'millions of sites impacted by PHP vulnerabilities'

The United Kingdom has taken 32 government services offline and left four more partially unavailable after security researchers uncovered critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the scripting language that powers nearly 70 percent of websites including Wikipedia and WordPress. Officials said no large public-facing critical services have been affected and stressed the outages are limited while security work is carried out, not evidence of hacking. The flaw allows remote code execution, meaning attackers could run their own code on affected servers to steal data or plant backdoors. The PHP Foundation said the vulnerabilities exist in all PHP installations serving web requests and date back to PHP version 5, released in 2004. Cloudflare reported millions of exploitation attempts within hours of the public announcement. For everyday users, the practical impact is that some council and official websites may be temporarily unreachable while administrators apply patches, and the government has confirmed next week's Budget security was not compromised.