[Source: Reuters]

Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of ​critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators around the world scrambling to protect their systems.

Developers of the PHP programming language on Wednesday released urgent new fixes, opens new tab to vulnerabilities that had been lurking ‌in their software for years until they were uncovered using AI, saying all users were “encouraged to update immediately.”

With tech firms warning that some hackers were already exploiting the flaws, government agencies across Europe were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.

Because a fix is now public and artificial intelligence tools are able to reverse engineer the bug with little effort, experts said they were bracing for a wave of intrusions as hackers jumped to get ahead of the updates.

AI was powering a “race to exploit,” said Costin Raiu, co-founder of cybersecurity research and incident response firm TLP:Black. He ​said the next step was the “mass compromise of every vulnerable web server on the internet.”

PHP — a language that dates back to the early 1990s and initially stood for “Personal Home Page” — underpins huge parts of the public-facing web and ​is baked into WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento sites, meaning any critical vulnerability potentially has enormous knock-on consequences.

“All servers using any version of PHP released in the last 20 years will ⁠be vulnerable,” said Tiffany Farriss, the interim chief executive of the Drupal Association. “This issue impacts the majority of the internet.”

Cybersecurity agencies around the world have urged PHP users to update immediately or take websites offline until patches can be applied.

According to data from ​Censys, the internet intelligence firm, about 1.5 million out of 2.6 million hosts report running a version of PHP for which there is no fix.