Internet Outage Halts Banking and Flights
Global companies and governments are racing to patch a critical vulnerability in PHP, the programming language underpinning much of the internet. The emergency response followed reports from cloud service providers of a sharp rise in hacking attempts shortly after the vulnerability was made public.
The rapid action came after several governments in Europe and elsewhere chose to take official websites offline as a precaution. Website operators are also working urgently to secure systems running the affected software.
Sudden shutdowns of banking, airline, railway, tax and public services from Tokyo to Helsinki have become one of the most serious tests for this decades-old programming foundation. The incident has also exposed the extent to which governments and global business giants depend on digital code understood by only a small number of people.
“I haven’t seen an event like this in a very, very long time,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany, Reuters reported on Monday (26 October 2026). He said the incident was a stark reminder of the need to build software that can be maintained securely as systems become increasingly complex.
“This has been a very long day and night for all the IT and cyber security teams out there.”
PHP: a foundation of the internet, like HTML and Python
Developers behind PHP, a major programming language comparable to HTML and Python, have released a patch for a security flaw that had remained hidden for years before being detected using artificial intelligence (AI). They urged all users to update their systems immediately.
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cyber security firm Aikido Security, said details of the vulnerability had leaked before a fix was ready to be implemented. A wave of cyberattacks followed.
“Companies are now racing to update their systems to hold off hackers using AI to exploit the vulnerability. This is a race against time,” Lawrence said.
As companies and governments took precautionary measures, hacking attempts were reported to have surged into the millions. Cloud service giants Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed the sharp increase.
“In the 10 hours before it was officially announced, we detected thousands of exploit attempts across our network,” Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said in a post on X.
“That figure jumped to tens of thousands just 45 minutes after the announcement, passed hundreds of thousands within two hours, and has now reached millions of attacks.”
System-wide impact from Japan to Finland
The cyber shock was strongly felt in Asia. Japanese corporate giants including brokerage Nomura, banking group Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), airline ANA and rail operator East Japan Railway were forced to suspend some of their online services temporarily.
Beer producer Asahi Group Holdings also temporarily halted operations on certain websites to assess the security impact. Insurer Tokio Marine Holdings suspended its main website as well.
Japanese government bodies were affected too: the Ministry of Finance, the Meteorological Agency and the National Tax Agency switched off some online services to meet cyber security safety standards. The widespread shutdowns reflected Tokyo’s high level of concern, particularly after TrendAI reported that cyber incidents in Japan during the first nine months of this year had exceeded the total for the previous year.
The disruption also reached Europe. French telecommunications giant Orange suspended access to several PHP-based applications and websites at some of its subsidiaries. In Finland, government IT provider Valtori worked around the clock to install security fixes after temporarily shutting down all public government web services.
“Restoring services could take days or even weeks. In addition to applying patches, all systems must be tested thoroughly,” Valtori director-general Hannu Naumanen said.
Recovery expected to take weeks
In response to the growing threat, authorities across Asia immediately ordered comprehensive cyber security inspections.
China’s Ministry of Industry urged all organisations and users to inspect their systems and upgrade to the most secure PHP version. Beijing also recommended strengthening cyber monitoring and regularly changing passwords and account access keys.
South Korea’s government formally raised the private sector’s cyber security alert level to ‘caution’ and activated emergency response protocols to prepare for possible follow-up attacks.
Felix Kuhlenkamp, head of security at Germany’s Digital Industry Association (Bitkom), said that although large corporations were relatively quick to apply fixes, recovery would take much longer for smaller organisations and complex IT systems.
“Many people run PHP-based websites but do not actively monitor them. If a website is still using an old version of PHP that no longer receives security updates, the entire system must be upgraded from scratch,” Kuhlenkamp said.