Link: https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20261021-websites-go-dark-worldwide-as-ai-exposes-critical-security-flaws

Washington (United States) (AFP) – Government agencies and companies around the world shut down websites Wednesday after two critical flaws came to light involving PHP, a programming language that is the basis for a large share of the internet.

PHP sits underneath popular web design platforms, so the weaknesses potentially affect a vast range of websites, from online stores and news outlets to government services.

Wiz, one of the security firms that found the issues, estimated that PHP runs about 70 percent of the world's websites and said the flaws rank "among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history."

The US National Security Agency told organizations to patch immediately or pull vulnerable systems offline.

The flaws "often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database," the NSA said in a statement on X.

Attackers could use them to take over web servers without needing a password.

Volker Dusch, a security engineer at the PHP Foundation, told the Wall Street Journal it was the most serious problem PHP had faced in more than a decade, comparing it to Heartbleed, a 2014 flaw that set off a worldwide rush to patch.

The discovery came amid a surge in software security disclosures driven by increasingly powerful AI models, with the number of vulnerabilities found in 2026 on track to roughly double last year's record total.

PHP volunteers released a fix on Wednesday.

"If you run PHP, it is imperative that you update now," the PHP Foundation, which funds developers working on the language, said in a blog post.

Security firm Calif found the flaws in August using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model, as part of an OpenAI-funded audit of PHP's code.

Google-owned Wiz said it found them independently weeks later with help from AI models including Google's Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol.

OpenAI said on X that it considered the bug "one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory," adding that it "marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact."

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"Websites go dark worldwide" is such a clickbait article title… I can't say the article wasn't at least mildly informative, but still.

FFS just update it. They released the updated versions early today and I patched our site at like 7:30am this morning. Took 5 minutes.

honestly think I had one post crap out and then I saw an offhand comment from rimu to suggest something was up security wise and then recently started see the articles. I guess what im saying is nothing has went dark that I use or even had much of an effect.

Yep, I noticed nothing except the overly hyped headlines. I guess we will see if a bunch of sites randomly get hacked soon, but so far it seems like a Y2k kind of thing.

yeah don't get me wrong it likely could be disasterous except for the diligence of IT folks updating quickly. but yeah the headlines make is sound like everything was suddenly not accessible.