Global security flaw continues to disrupt numerous German websites

Numerous websites across Germany remained affected by a global security vulnerability on Thursday, with government portals, hospitals and universities among those experiencing disruptions.

Berlin's official city portal, Berlin.de, was only partially accessible, as were websites of some hospitals and universities in the region. The capital's S-Bahn suburban rail operator, meanwhile, said its websites were fully operational again.

Websites across several German states had been temporarily taken offline as a precaution because of a critical security flaw in the widely used programming language PHP.

By Thursday morning, many websites were back online, including services in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Thuringia.

Several police online services in North Rhine-Westphalia had also been restored, although other prominent websites in the state remained inaccessible.

The disruptions were caused by a newly discovered security vulnerability that criminals could potentially exploit. The long-hidden programming faults were discovered using advanced artificial intelligence models.

PHP is widely used to power websites, ranging from blogs and news portals to online shops and content management systems such as WordPress.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) issued a cybersecurity warning, urging website operators to install security updates quickly because of the significant potential threat.

Ordinary internet users were not initially required to take immediate action, as the flaw affects servers rather than their devices.

However, they could still be affected indirectly through disruptions to online services or potential data leaks from websites that had not been secured in time.