PHP vulnerabilities discovered with artificial intelligence forced government websites to shut down

Following the critical vulnerabilities detected in the PHP programming language that remained hidden for years, some government institutions in Europe and Asia temporarily closed their websites to access. While cybersecurity agencies worldwide issued urgent update calls due to these vulnerabilities discovered using artificial intelligence models, software developers quickly released patches.

Following developments on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, the Dutch cybersecurity agency, the Port of Rotterdam, the French Ministry of the Interior, and various Finnish government services took their sites offline as a precautionary measure. Since the widely used PHP language forms the infrastructure of platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, it raised global concerns against potential mass cyberattacks.

It was reported that the security vulnerabilities in question were detected by cybersecurity firms utilizing artificial intelligence models such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-5.6. Meanwhile, Amazon announced that it had detected cyberattack attempts targeting its systems as of October 17, prior to the public disclosure of these vulnerabilities.