PHP: The three little letters wreaking havoc across the web

Two vulnerabilities found in the programming language PHP put enormous swaths of the internet in danger.

By some accounts, up to 70 percent of websites use PHP in some capacity. It powers Wikipedia, WordPress, Drupal, and a host of other popular sites and platforms, including DeviantArt and 4Chan, which were temporarily shut down after the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Even governments weren’t immune.

But it’s not as simple as updating a few servers. The vulnerability exists in every version of PHP dating back roughly 20 years, many of which are no longer supported. That means some older sites and services that are no longer actively maintained are at risk, leaving them with little option but to permanently shut down.

Here’s all the latest developments in what security firm Wiz has called “among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered … in software history.”

• The disastrous PHP vulnerabilities were exploited days before the patch
• The Internet Archive was briefly forced offline because of PHP.
• Two old-school Japanese mobile games are shutting down over the PHP exploit.
• The PHP2Shell exploit hit Cloudflare hard.
• PHP: The three letters that shut down sites all over the internet today
• GPT‑5.6 Sol was used to identify critical PHP flaw.
• A critical PHP vulnerability may take websites down today