Two critical PHP vulnerabilities discovered with AI assistance have caused widespread site outages across major platforms including 4chan, DeviantArt, Wikipedia, and WordPress-powered sites. Government agencies in the Netherlands and Finland took their sites offline preemptively, while the NSA and UK's NCSC advised organizations to shut down systems if updates aren't immediately feasible.
Background
PHP powers roughly 75% of all websites globally, making any critical vulnerability in the language a potential systemic risk. This incident underscores the fragility of internet infrastructure built on widely adopted but complex open-source languages.
- Source
- The Verge
- Published
- Oct 22, 2026 at 04:36 AM
- Score
- 9.0 / 10