A major PHP vulnerability has affected scores of websitesMany popular sites have gone offline or restricted their operationsGovernment sites across Europe have also been affected

A major flaw found in the PHP coding language that powers an untold number of websites across the internet has seen scores of sites taken offline as they attempt to patch out the severe vulnerability.

If you’ve found your favorite website has been unavailable over the last few days, there’s a chance it’s related to this security incident.

Here, we’ve put together a list of as many affected websites as we can find, along with reasoning given by the sites where possible. You can also follow all the latest news in our PHP crisis liveblog.

Global sites

1. Wikimedia / Wikipedia

(Image credit: Wikimedia / @oscarmike88)

The Wikimedia Foundation said it had taken some services offline to patch the PHP security vulnerability.

The group runs popular websites like Wikipedia and said in a blog post that “You may see outages for our wikis as we work on this, and we have deliberately taken many of our supporting services offline until they can be safely patched.”

The organization said this includes services such as Toolforge and Cloud VPS, while a separate post said that Wikimedia Cloud Services and other tools were affected.

2. Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, which backs up pages across the internet, was offline on October 21. The organization posted on X to say that “Archive.org is currently offline. We are working to restore service now,” although this was not definitively linked to the PHP incident.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle called his organizations operations staff “heroes” due to their actions in limiting the damage.

3. Orange Telecom

(Image credit: Getty Images / Chesnot)

The telecommunications giant Orange has announced thats it’s “temporarily” suspended access to several of its websites and apps that use PHP.

That move affects dozens of countries, mostly in Europe but also Africa and the Middle East. Orange called it a “precautionary” measure and that each country would communicate which sites have been affected locally.

That could cause a lot of confusion in some regions — for example, in France Orange has over 34 million customers. Orange said it “apologizes to impacted customers and users for any inconvenience caused”.

Other popular sites

Many other high-traffic websites were affected or taken offline in response to the PHP crisis. That included several of the BBC news site’s pages, message board 4chan, school community site Pinboard, wiki hosting site Miraheze, and mapping tool OpenStreetMap all either went offline or restricted their operations.

Some major sites paused operations without mentioning PHP. That included the likes of Nintendo, productivity tool Asana, language-learning platform Duolingo, and games storefront GOG.

And several games also went offline, such as Pokémon Sleep, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Granblue Fantasy, and Princess Connect! Re:Dive.

UK sites

A UK minister has revealed that 32 government services are currently offline due to the PHP security threat, while a spokesperson added: “Our work has begun with OpenAI and NCSC to fix vulnerabilities in government systems”.

Meanwhile, the country’s Office for Budget Responsibility took to X on October 21 to announce that “Consistent with guidance from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), we have taken our website offline in view of the critical security issues affecting PHP. We will continue to follow further guidance.” As of October 22, the Office’s website is back online.

The National Cyber Security Centre also warned organizations to identify where PHP was used across their systems and update to the latest version of the coding language as soon as possible. It added that “If you are unable to apply the temporary mitigations, or applying them would take too long, you should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.”

Several local government websites also went offline in the UK, including those of Edinburgh Council, Oxfordshire County Council and Hillingdon Council.

Europe

A large number of European governmental and commercial websites have been taken offline while patches are rolled out for the PHP vulnerability. That includes those below:

Belgium: The Foreign MinistryCzechia: The national government websiteDenmark: Municipal IT company KombitFinland: Public government service websitesFrance: Local government (prefecture) websites run by the Interior MinistryGermany: The federal IT service provider ITZBundNetherlands: The National Cyber Security CentreNetherlands: The Port of RotterdamNetherlands: Government website Overheid.nlNetherlands: National football association KNVBNetherlands: The ‌websites of ⁠the five largest political partiesNetherlands: The websites of many national hospitals