Websites worldwide experienced outages over a 24-hour period as enterprises and public sector agencies rushed to secure systems against newly identified vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language. The widespread disruptions occurred while technical teams deployed emergency patches to close security gaps that could have enabled malicious cyber-attacks.
PHP powers an estimated 70% of all websites across the internet. Further details regarding the nature of the security flaws and the extent of the disruptions are expected to emerge as the story develops.