You may have seen news reports about a major PHP security vulnerability affecting websites around the world. PHP is the programming language behind around 70% of websites, including WordPress websites.
We’d like to reassure all our hosting customers that we’ve already taken care of everything behind-the-scenes.
🔒 What we’ve done to protect your website
Ahead of the official security patch being released, protective measures were put in place across our hosting platforms to help reduce the risk posed by these vulnerabilities. All our hosting customers benefit from these hosting-level security measures, regardless of their hosting plan.
Our Business and Enterprise hosting plans additionally include Cloudflare protection, providing an extra firewall layer to help identify and block malicious traffic before it reaches the website.
✅ The official PHP security patches were released on 21 October 2026 and have now been applied to our hosting platforms.
We’re pleased to confirm that these upgrades were applied without any downtime for our customers’ websites.
There’s nothing you need to do. We’ve handled the updates and security measures for you.
How artificial intelligence uncovered the vulnerabilities
One of the most interesting aspects of this security incident is how artificial intelligence (AI) helped researchers uncover vulnerabilities that had existed within PHP for more than a decade. AI found extremely complex weaknesses within PHP’s underlying code.
Security researchers described the complexity as being at the limits of what human researchers could practically achieve using traditional methods, whereas AI can analyse enormous amounts of code and put together scenarios using a complicated sequence of events.
Security is an ongoing responsibility
Keeping websites secure isn’t just about responding to major incidents like this one. It’s something we work on continuously.
In fact, during the third quarter of 2026, we applied more security patches than in any previous quarter, a trend we believe is driven by advances in AI-assisted security research, which is helping uncover vulnerabilities that might otherwise have gone undetected.
We’ll be sharing more details about this, and the work that goes into maintaining our hosting platforms, in a forthcoming blog article.
In the meantime, our customers can rest assured that we’re continuing to look after your websites, keeping them updated, protected and running smoothly.
