The governments of France, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands are shutting down their websites after discovering PHP vulnerabilities with the help of artificial intelligence

Official government websites in France, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands were unavailable for several hours on Wednesday after an alert was issued about two critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language.

The pages were voluntarily taken offline or placed in preventive maintenance mode to protect IT systems. The issues affected several websites across Europe that used PHP, a language widely used on the internet.

PHP developers released updates designed to fix the vulnerabilities, which were rated 9.2 out of 10 on the CVSS v4.0 scale used to measure the severity of cyber threats. International authorities in the field recommended permanently shutting down websites that cannot be updated.

France’s Interior Ministry announced that government platforms had been placed in preventive maintenance mode. In Denmark, IT company Kombit shut down several services, including the national platform for school communications, while some websites of the Dutch government were also temporarily closed.

Some of the websites later came back online after the issues were fixed. According to Sky News, artificial intelligence agents may have contributed to identifying the vulnerabilities.