Companies and governments around the world are racing to patch critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that underpins a large share of the web, as hacking attempts surged after the flaws were disclosed.
PHP developers released fixes on Wednesday and urged users to update immediately. Cloud providers reported that exploitation attempts climbed from thousands to hundreds of thousands and then into the millions within hours.
Some banking, transport, tax and government websites in Japan and parts of Europe were temporarily taken offline as a precaution while security teams deployed fixes.