32 government services taken offline during precautionary PHP security updates

Thirty-two government services are offline and four are partly unavailable while officials apply security updates and mitigations for a critical weakness in PHP, a programming language used widely across the web. Ministers say the outages are precautionary and that no large public-facing critical UK services have been affected; they have not said that government systems were hacked.

The National Cyber Security Centre urged organisations to install a fixed version of PHP or consider taking affected websites offline until they can update. The government says it was briefed by OpenAI last week and acted before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed. PHP supports features such as online forms and shopping, and Cloudflare estimates that almost 70 per cent of websites use it; Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander said he had no indication that the flaw had compromised the security of next week’s Budget.