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Government portals, municipal networks and public institutions across Europe and other regions went offline on Wednesday (October 21) after researchers disclosed critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a foundational programming language that powers a vast portion of the global web. PHP underpins roughly 75% of all websites where the server-side language can be identified, according to web analytics tracker W3Techs.
Created in the early 1990s as “Personal Home Page,” PHP has evolved into one of the core backbones of modern internet infrastructure. The disclosures prompted emergency responses from IT teams worldwide, with operators taking critical servers offline as a defensive shield to prevent malicious intrusions before security updates could be deployed. Developers of the open-source PHP language published urgent security fixes for flaws that had remained buried inside the language’s codebase for years. Issuing an emergency advisory, the team stated that all site owners and server administrators are “encouraged to update immediately. When a user visits a webpage, servers running PHP assemble the text, media and code before serving it to the browser.