TOKYO: Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the internet, as a cloud firm reported millions of hacking attempts after vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software. The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.
“I've not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on Thursday, saying the incident showed the importance of building software that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex. “It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks.”
Critical code repair
The developers of PHP — a key computing language like HTML and Python — released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI, urging users to “update immediately”.
Emergency shutdowns from Tokyo to Helsinki put decades-old code to its most dramatic test yet
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready, with attacks reported since. “Companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That's the whole race,” she said.
As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare. “In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday.
“That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”
Global concern
Japanese companies including brokerage Nomura, lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, airline ANA and East Japan Railway said on Thursday they were temporarily suspending some internet services as part of emergency measures.
Brewer Asahi Group Holdings temporarily suspended certain websites and systems and was conducting a security impact assessment. Insurer Tokio Marine Holdings said it had suspended its group website.
Japan's Ministry of Finance and Meteorological Agency partially suspended online services to implement safety measures, while Japan's National Tax Agency temporarily took down its service.
The precautionary shutdowns show Japan's growing concerns over cybersecurity, as the country recorded more cyber incidents in the first nine months of the year than in all of last year, according to data from TrendAI. French telecoms group Orange said it had temporarily suspended access to certain PHP-based websites and applications across several subsidiaries as a precaution.
Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2026
