A significant number of websites have gone offline, and that is not due to a service outage but a deliberate decision by site owners. Extremely dangerous security vulnerabilities have been found in PHP, a protocol used by most websites. This issue is unrelated to a separate vulnerability discovered in web certificates.
PHP is one of the weirder acronyms around. While it originally stood for Personal Home Page, it is now more usually defined as the recursive "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor." It is an open-source, general-purpose scripting language, well suited to web development and able to be embedded into HTML. It is used by around 70% of all websites.
AI models and a cybersecurity researcher simultaneously discovered a major security flaw in PHP in mid-August. A combination of two vulnerabilities allowed an exploit that could give an attacker direct access to the underlying file system or database behind a website. That could expose a vast amount of personal data. To allow time for the problem to be patched by the PHP Foundation, disclosure was embargoed until this week, though it leaked two days early.
Not every website has been able to apply the patch yet, and Amazon Web Services said the vulnerabilities are being "broadly exploited" across the internet. The problem is so serious that the NSA has advised that unpatched sites be taken offline until it is fixed. As a result, many commercial and government websites have been taken offline until PHP can be updated on their servers. 9to5Mac and its sister sites say they are already protected.
Source: 9to5Mac · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing