Why governments pulled websites offline over the decades-old PHP programming language

Photo: A close-up view of PHP code. Photo credit: Pixabay via Pexels. Article by Isabel O’Brien. CNBC – updated October 22, 2026.

Government websites in Europe were taken offline on Wednesday as concerns spread about vulnerabilities in servers that host sites coded in PHP, the world’s most popular server programming language. The U.S. National Security Agency warned millions of organizations to either implement patches immediately or take their servers offline. It’s the latest cyber scare in the artificial intelligence era, as vulnerabilities that previously took weeks or months for hackers to find can now be exploited in a matter of hours. […]

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