Finland's government and BBC websites taken down after PHP vulnerabilities fixed.

International governments and cyber‑security agencies urged website operators to patch two critical flaws in the PHP programming language on Wednesday, after a fix was released that afternoon, prompting a wave of takedowns that spanned from Finland’s public portals to the BBC’s programme pages.

PHP underpins a large share of the internet, powering everything from small blogs to major news sites. The vulnerabilities, which give attackers direct access to a server’s file system or database, were uncovered by artificial‑intelligence tools used by researchers at the security firms Calif and Wiz as part of OpenAI’s “Patch the Planet” program. The flaws had reportedly lingered unnoticed for more than a decade before AI‑driven analysis exposed them, marking the first time advanced frontier models have been used to find such deep‑seated code weaknesses.

Finland temporarily shut down its government web services, while the Dutch cyber‑security agency took its own site offline. The U.S. National Security Agency posted advice on X urging any organization unable to apply the patch to consider pulling its sites down, and the White House said federal agencies were collaborating with leading AI labs to accelerate a fix. Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, called on citizens to verify whether their public sites run on PHP. In the United Kingdom, the BBC removed pages for programmes such as *Doctor Who* and *The Traitors*, and Edinburgh council’s website went dark. The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed it had taken several systems offline as a precaution, causing brief access issues on Wikipedia, while platforms like DeviantArt announced temporary maintenance without detailing the cause.

The episode highlights how AI is reshaping cyber‑defence, turning tools that once helped attackers into weapons against hidden software bugs. Experts say organisations must act quickly to apply the patch, or risk prolonged outages and potential data breaches. As more entities audit their codebases for PHP reliance, the incident may accelerate a broader move toward newer, more secure web technologies and tighter coordination between governments, industry and AI researchers.