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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Governments and businesses around the world scrambled to prevent hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in PHP, a popular programming language.
Japan’s prime minister. A hospital in Germany. Taxpayers in France. An I.T. firm in Kenya.
People’s online routines were disrupted around the globe on Wednesday and Thursday as governments and companies rushed to protect their websites, after security researchers found major flaws in a widely used programming language called PHP.
Many took their websites down as an emergency precaution while they fixed the flaw, which was identified using artificial intelligence. A fix was quickly available, and software developers and tech departments from Helsinki to New York scrambled to apply it, meaning that in many cases the outages lasted less than a day.
But the flaw and the temporary shutdowns it provoked showed how far-reaching potential cyberattacks could be — and how deeply the internet has embedded itself into our lives.
In Finland, one of the most digitized countries in the world, the government’s public websites were temporarily shut down, forcing even basic tasks to .
“It’s in the fabric of our society, a lot of these services,” said Kalle Pusa, 33, a software developer who is involved in Helsinki city politics. “And I think yesterday and today, a lot of the fabric was a bit ripped apart.”
Mr. Pusa was trying to arrange for the local garbage department to pick up an old couch. But that had to wait until the site was back online.
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