Government websites in the EU and Canada taken offline over PHP vulnerability

One of the two major issues impacting web security this morning has had a ripple effect. In the wake of an announcement from the PHP Foundation that it was issuing a security release to patch two critical vulnerabilities, several government websites in the EU and Canada were taken offline as a preventive measure. Reuters reported that governments in the Netherlands, Denmark, France and Finland took down at least some websites as a preventive measure. Meanwhile Evan Solomon, Canada's Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, posted on X about the decision to temporarily go offline, while seconding the call for any website operators using PHP to update as soon as possible. PHP is a programming language for websites.