UK Government websites taken offline amid cyber security threat

Some 32 Government services are offline and four are partially unavailable while work is carried out to address potential PHP cyber security issues, a minister has said in the House of Lords.

However, no large UK public-facing critical services have been affected, a Downing Street spokeswoman confirmed.

The official 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.

"No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out.

"But this does not mean they were hacked, and work continues to resolve any issues."

The spokeswoman said it was not "standard practice" to provide a list of Government services that were affected.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has taken down its website ahead of the Budget next week.

This downtime is a precaution while it updates to the latest version of PHP, which has a patch for the critical vulnerability.

It came after cybersecurity chiefs warned UK organisations on Wednesday that a "critical security issue" had been discovered in PHP, which is used by almost 70 per cent of websites according to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare.

PHP is a popular programming language used across an immense number of popular websites.

The issue has affected many official websites including those for hospital resources and school websites, alongside Government portals.

The Office for Budget Responsibility said it had followed guidance to take its website offline "in view of the critical security issues affecting PHP".

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The security of next week’s Budget has not been compromised by the security flaw, a minister has said.

The National Cyber Security Centre has instructed British organisations to update to a new, fixed version of the PHP programming language or take their websites offline if that's not possible.

Oxford City Council and the City of Edinburgh Council have been forced to take their websites offline.

Some international government services in Finland, France, and Denmark have also been partly disabled as a precaution.