What Is Happening Around the World: Government agencies and companies in several countries shut down websites on October 22 to protect themselves from hackers. Authorities in the UK, France and Finland took state internet services offline, and the Netherlands’ cybersecurity agency took its own site down. State websites in Australia and Japan were also affected.
The PHP Flaws Behind the Shutdowns
The trigger is a pair of critical security flaws in PHP, a programming language widely used to build websites. Cybersecurity firm Wiz, one of the companies that found them, estimates PHP code helps run about 70 percent of the world’s websites. These range from online shops and news sites to government portals. Reports differ on which organisations deserve credit for finding the flaws, but they agree that AI tools helped uncover them.
Why Sites Chose to Go Dark
Security updates are available for some of the flaws. Cyber officials have advised organisations that cannot apply fixes quickly to take their sites offline to prevent breaches. A major challenge for large organisations is simply finding every place PHP runs inside their systems. In France, local government sites, including one for the Paris police, were made inaccessible at the request of the national cybersecurity agency.
Is Bangladesh Affected?
No Bangladeshi website outage linked to this issue has been reported so far. Even so, many websites in Bangladesh, including news portals, online shops and some institutional sites, are likely built on PHP-based tools. That means the same risk could apply locally until sites are patched or checked.
Why Bangladesh’s Digital Services Could Be Exposed
Bangladesh’s digital economy has grown quickly, with e-commerce, mobile financial services and freelancing all relying on websites and cloud services. Many small businesses run older or poorly maintained sites that are slow to receive security updates. Local government and educational portals can also lag on patching, which makes them easier targets.
Lessons From Earlier Disruptions
Bangladesh has felt the effects of outages before. When Google services such as Gmail and Drive failed for hours in 2020, a Bangladeshi minister acknowledged the country’s heavy dependence on such platforms and said alternatives should be explored. A past internet shutdown also cost the IT and outsourcing sector an estimated Tk 70-80 crore a day, according to industry leaders. These episodes show how quickly a disruption can ripple through businesses.
What Website Owners Should Do Now
- Check which PHP version and applications your site runs.
- Apply available security updates immediately.
- Take non-essential or unsupported sites offline until they are fixed.
- Back up data and keep a tested recovery plan.
- Watch for suspicious logins, file changes and unusual traffic.
- Follow advisories from national cyber emergency teams.
What Ordinary Users Can Do
Expect some sites to be briefly unavailable and avoid using unofficial mirrors. Be wary of phishing emails claiming to offer “security fixes”. Use strong, unique passwords and turn on two-factor authentication for banking, email and social accounts.
The Bigger Picture
The shutdowns show how one flaw in widely used software can disrupt services across many countries at once. For Bangladesh, the lesson is to speed up patching, back up critical systems and prepare for incidents before they strike.
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