Japan scrambles to patch PHP flaws as banks and airlines go offline

Japanese companies, from banks to airlines, took down digital services to protect themselves from vulnerabilities in the widely used PHP programming language. It is one of the starkest examples of disruption caused by flaws in common internet software.

• Japanese banks and airlines pulled online services to guard against PHP vulnerabilities
• The disruption followed the discovery of critical flaws in PHP
• The case is among the most visible outages tied to widely used software