Decades-old flaw discovered by Google, OpenAI AI tools forces government and public websites to go offline globally

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. 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.”With tech security firms warning that malicious actors have already begun targeting unpatched setups, the disclosure triggered an immediate “race to exploit.” As…