Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the internet, as a cloud firm reported millions of hacking attempts after vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software. The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax, and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.
"I've not seen anything like this in a long, long time," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on Thursday, noting that the incident showed the importance of building software that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex. "It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks."
The developers of PHP—a key computing language alongside HTML and Python—released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI, urging users to "update immediately."
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready, with attacks reported shortly after disclosure.
