What Is PHP? Why Are Government and Business Websites Going Offline?

Governments and companies around the world are racing to patch their websites — or taking them offline until they can be fixed — after the discovery of major security flaws in PHP, a piece of software that underpins much of the internet.

OpenAI, whose artificial intelligence models were used to find the bugs, said in a blog post that it was “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory” given PHP’s widespread use.

While many websites were taken down as a protective measure, as of Thursday afternoon there had not been any confirmed successful attacks using the PHP flaws, according to an analysis by Dataminr, a risk-intelligence cybersecurity company.

“Observed activity since vulnerability disclosure remains limited to scanning, fingerprinting and use of non-working exploits, with no known compromises,” Dataminr said, though it added it was “only a matter of time” before successful intrusions would occur.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/technology/what-is-php-vulnerability-risks.html