A U.S. spike in user-submitted Wikipedia outage reports coincided with Wikimedia Foundation emergency maintenance for two critical PHP vulnerabilities, though the foundation did not link the events.
Hindustan Times, citing Downdetector, reported 3,195 submissions at 11:35 a.m. EDT (15:35 UTC) on Oct. 21. The outlet said 92% were categorized as website problems and 7% as app problems. TechRadar separately reported more than 3,000 U.S. reports.
The Wikimedia Foundation said its work addressed two critical vulnerabilities in PHP and warned that wiki outages were possible during the response. It said it had taken many supporting services offline as it handled the security work. Some services used by volunteer developers, including Toolforge and Cloud VPS, might take longer to return while their operators made changes, the Foundation said.
The PHP project said releases 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fixed vulnerabilities that could allow remote code execution without authentication. Hindustan Times also reported that some social media users saw an “a607b0e” error; the Wikimedia Foundation did not explain the code.
At 12:30 a.m. UTC on Oct. 22, the Foundation’s status page marked the maintenance complete and listed Reading and Editing as operational.
