AI Discovers Critical PHP2Shell Vulnerabilities, Triggering Global Government Website Shutdowns

Artificial intelligence research teams uncovered two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language powering 70% of the world's websites, forcing governments across North America and Europe to take their digital services offline as an emergency precaution on October 21, 2026. The flaws, designated CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and collectively named PHP2Shell, expose memory-safety issues in PHP's session handling, OPcache class caching, and fatal-error backtrace generation that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable servers.