Some 32 government services are offline and four are partially unavailable while work is carried out to address potential cybersecurity issues, a minister has said.
As the Press Association reports, organisations around the world have been scrambling to fix a critical security flaw in the programming language PHP used by the majority of websites.
Downing Street on Thursday said no large UK public-facing critical services have been affected, but some “limited” government websites have gone dark while issues are resolved. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) experts are working with OpenAI, whose technology was used to discover the vulnerabilities, and partners around the globe to address potential problems, a No 10 spokesperson said.
In the House of Lords, Liz Lloyd, the tech minister, said:
The information I have is that 32 government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable.
Lloyd said that “has largely resulted from precautionary measures taken to protect systems while security updates and mitigations are applied”.
The No 10 spokesperson told reporters:
Work has already taken place across government to identify and fix potential exposures to our systems, and our experts are continuing to work closely with both OpenAI and international partners on this issue.
Here is our story about the global impact of the problems identified in the PHP programming language. It’s by Robert Booth and Aisha Down.
