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Several government websites, including Statistics Canada, were still down Thursday morning, at the same time that coding vulnerabilities occurring around the world have opened the door to millions of reported hacking attempts.
“We apologize! The website is currently unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience,” a bulletin on Statistics Canada’s website stated at the time of publication.
This comes after other outages included the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website, which handles trademark and copyright information, also being shut down on Wednesday.
Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon said Wednesday in a post on social media that the website went dark to protect government systems and Canadians’ information following guidance from the Canadian Center for Cyber Security.
He said this was done in response to a vulnerability identified in PHP, a programming language that is widely used and covers about 70 percent of the world’s websites.
“This is a global problem, and governments and other organizations are also taking protective measures,” he said.
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The British Columbia government on Wednesday posted on social media that it had taken down some of its web pages “as a precautionary measure following a new global cybersecurity vulnerability.”
The BC government says teams are working to restore service as soon as possible.
PHP developers released an urgent fix on Wednesday for a vulnerability that had been lurking in the software for years until it was discovered using AI, and urged users to “update immediately.”
“Details of this flaw became public before a fix was ready, and attacks had already been reported,” Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity company Aikido Security, told Reuters.
“So companies are racing to provide updates against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That’s the whole race.”
As companies and governments implemented patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking attempts soared into the millions, according to cloud services company Cloudflare NET.N.
“In the 10 hours before it went public, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X on Wednesday evening.
“The numbers jumped to tens of thousands within 45 minutes of the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions now.”
The FBI’s cyber division said this vulnerability allows malicious actors to remotely execute code in programming languages, potentially compromising sensitive data and networks.
The PHP Foundation, which includes developers working to secure the programming language, said it had released a fix for the vulnerability, along with instructions on how to update the system.
Governments in Europe and other countries took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday, while website operators worked to secure systems running the software.
The Finnish government website was only partially available on Wednesday. A message to visitors said the Finnish government website experienced a temporary outage and was completely or partially unavailable while the issue was being resolved.
The emergency shutdown of banking, airlines, railways, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki shows how many public and corporate systems depend on such software, and how difficult it is to fix those flaws quickly once they are made public.
“It was a long day and a long night, I know that for all the IT and security staff… I haven’t seen anything like this in a very long time,” Microsoft MSFT.O CEO Satya Nadella said at a company event in Cologne, Germany, on Thursday.
He said the episode underscored the importance of building digital systems that can be maintained securely.
– with files from The Canadian Press and Reuters
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
