Which major websites have been affected by the PHP security crisis? Here are the biggest ones yet, from Wikipedia to the Internet Archive.
follow us
Add us as a preferred source on Google
- A major PHP vulnerability has affected dozens of websites
- Many popular sites have gone offline or restricted their operations.
- Government sites across Europe have also been affected
A major flaw found in the PHP coding language that powers an untold number of websites on the Internet has caused dozens of sites to go offline while attempting to fix the serious vulnerability.
If you found that your favorite website was unavailable in the past few days, there is a chance that it is related to this security incident.
Here, we’ve put together a list of as many affected websites as we can find, along with reasoning provided by the sites where possible. You can also follow all the news on our PHP crisis live blog.
Latest videos ofTechnologyRadar
Global sites
The Wikimedia Foundation said it had taken some services offline to fix the PHP security vulnerability.
The group runs popular websites like Wikipedia and said in a blog post saying: “You may see outages to our wikis as we work on this, and we have deliberately taken many of our support services offline until they can be safely patched.”
The organization said this includes services like Toolforge and Cloud VPS, while a separate post said Wikimedia Cloud Services and other tools were affected.
2. Internet Archive
An update from Brewster Kahle on today’s outage. https://t.co/Gukju5sKFOOctober 21, 2026
Internet Archive, which backs up pages on 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 definitely not related to the PHP incident.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle called his organization’s operations staff “heroes” for their actions to limit the damage.
The telecommunications giant Orange has announced that it has “temporarily” suspended access to several of its websites and applications that use PHP.
This measure affects dozens of countries, especially in Europe, but also in Africa and the Middle East. Orange called it a “precautionary” measure and that each country would communicate which sites have been affected locally.
This could cause a lot of confusion in some regions; For example, in France, Orange has more than 34 million customers. Orange said it “apologizes to affected 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. This 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 going offline or having their operations restricted.
Some major sites suspended operations without mentioning PHP. That included people like Nintendo, productivity tool Asana, language learning platform Duolingo and game store GOG.
And several games also went offline, such as Pokémon Sleep, Umamusume: nice derby, fantasy big blueand Princess Connect! Re: Diving.
UK sites
In accordance with the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) guidelines, we have taken our website offline in light of critical security issues affecting PHP. We will continue to follow further instructions. For more information, see the NCSC notice: https://t.co/A3qp8ESZtfOctober 21, 2026
A UK minister 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 of Budget Responsibility took to As of October 22, the Office’s website is back online.
The National Cyber Security Center also warned organizations to identify where PHP is used on their systems and update to the latest version of the coding language as soon as possible. He added that “if you cannot apply 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 were also taken offline in the UK, including those of Edinburgh City Council, Oxfordshire Council and Hillingdon Council.
Europe
A large number of European government and commercial websites have been taken offline while patches for the PHP vulnerability are deployed. That includes the following:
- Belgium: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- Czechia: the national government website
- Denmark: municipal IT company Kombit
- Finland: public government services websites
- France: local government (prefecture) websites managed by the Ministry of the Interior
- Germany: Federal IT service provider ITZBund
- Netherlands: National Cyber Security Center
- Netherlands: the port of Rotterdam
- Netherlands: Government website Overheid.nl
- Netherlands: National Football Federation KNVB
- Netherlands: The websites of the five largest political parties
- Netherlands: the websites of many national hospitals
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds.
The best laptops for all budgets
Post Comment