‘Limited’ Government services temporarily offline amid PHP cybersecurity issue

Some “limited” Government services may temporarily be offline while work is carried out to address potential cybersecurity issues, Downing Street has said.

Organisations around the world have been scrambling to fix a critical security flaw in the programming language PHP used by the majority of websites.

No large UK public-facing critical services have been affected, a No 10 spokeswoman said on Thursday.

The official told reporters: “Work has already taken place across Government to identify and fix potential exposures to our systems, and our experts are continuing to work closely with both OpenAI and international partners on this issue.

“No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out.

“But this does not mean they were hacked, and work continues to resolve any issues.”

The spokeswoman said it was not “standard practice” to provide a list of Government services that were affected.

It came after cybersecurity chiefs warned UK organisations on Wednesday that a “critical security issue” had been discovered in PHP, which is used by almost 70% of websites according cybersecurity firm Cloudflare.