South African presidency website temporarily offline after PHP warning

The presidency temporarily took its website offline following a PHP warning, presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told Reuters on Friday, adding there was no indication of a security breach.

“While such warnings do not indicate a security breach, they can affect the normal operation of a website,” Magwenya said.

He added that the website was taken down as a precaution.

Governments and businesses worldwide have rushed to secure systems running the PHP programming language after flaws were disclosed, forcing some services offline and triggering millions of hacking attempts in one of the most significant cybersecurity incidents in recent years.

PHP underpins a large share of the public web and is widely used by content management systems including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, giving any critical vulnerability potentially widespread consequences.

PHP developers on Wednesday released fixes for the flaws and urged users to update affected systems immediately.