UK government reports disruption to 32 services amid cybersecurity issue

Thirty-two UK government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable amid an ongoing cybersecurity issue involving the PHP programming language, a minister told the House of Lords on Thursday. Baroness Lloyd of Effra, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said the disruption "largely resulted" from precautionary measures taken to protect systems while updates and security mitigations are applied. She said the government was working closely with agencies to "restore the services safely and securely." "The government acted proactively ahead of public disclosure," said Lloyd, adding that agencies had been alerted to the vulnerability and advised to identify potentially affected systems, assess their exposure and prepare to implement security updates and mitigations. Lloyd said the National Cyber Security Centre had made "50,000 proactive notifications to the wider economy to advise business and other organizations on what actions they should take." "The government continues to monitor the situation closely and work with departments to maintain the security resilience and availability of public services," she added. Downing Street said that "no large public-facing critical services are being affected" while acknowledging that some "limited services may temporarily be offline" as security work continues. "This does not mean they were hacked," it added. The vulnerability in PHP, a programming language widely used to develop websites, has prompted organizations around the world to take action to secure potentially affected systems. Internet infrastructure platform Cloudflare said on US social media company X that it had observed "millions" of hacking attempts on its network. There was no evidence, however, that the attempts had been successful.