The Wikimedia Foundation is currently preparing for two critical security vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that underpins much of what we operate today. These vulnerabilities are severe and require affected website owners to take immediate action. This issue is not specific to the Wikimedia Foundation, but affects any website running PHP. This is a significant internet security vulnerability that many organizations are responding to right now.
You may see outages for our wikis as we work on this, and we have deliberately taken many of our supporting services offline until they can be safely patched.
These include services (such as Toolforge and Cloud VPS) that volunteer developers support and use that are hosted within Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure but require service owners who are volunteer developers to make a change before they can come back online. These services will be offline until they can be safely brought back online. For some of these services, users have direct control over what PHP version they use, making it more difficult for Wikimedia Foundation staff to safely restore these services – they may be offline for longer. Foundation staff are working rapidly to triage, contact documented service owners, and upgrade systems where they have the access to do so.
If you notice a compromised system or wish to report a security issue, please follow the security bug reporting process, which is monitored closely by the Wikimedia Foundation’s security team.
Edit: Updated 15:52 UTC to acknowledge wiki outages as we are working on this.
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