European sites taken offline after AI finds two PHP flaws
On 21 October 2026 governments, schools and hospitals in several European countries disabled parts of their web services after AI-assisted researchers found two serious PHP vulnerabilities.
Parts of government portals, school websites and hospital pages across several European countries were temporarily taken offline after researchers using artificial intelligence discovered two serious security flaws in PHP, one of the web’s most widely used programming languages.
Technical gap triggered preventive shutdowns
The flaws, identified with the help of AI, can allow attackers to run code on vulnerable servers remotely, even without prior authentication. Because the vulnerability enables remote code execution, administrators in multiple countries opted to disable affected services as a precaution.
The shutdowns began on 21 October 2026, when government institutions, schools, hospitals and other organizations started disconnecting parts of their online services to reduce the risk of widescale exploitation.
European and American cybersecurity agencies issued urgent warnings to public and private organizations, calling on them to apply available patches and update systems immediately to close the exposure.
Experts warn that the episode highlights how dependent millions of citizens are on a digital infrastructure that can quickly become fragile when core components are found to be insecure.
Photo: press material from the event
