AI-found PHP flaws send websites offline, from Edinburgh to Doctor Who

Joe Tidy explains how defensive AI research uncovered a decade-old weakness, and why IT teams are now pulling their own sites down.

Channel: BBC News Story of October 22, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 1,439,510 views a day, 51 times a normal first day on this channel (28,188).

Websites taken down worldwide as AI reveals critical cyber-security threat | BBC News

The secret got out early. Researchers had planned to reveal a set of critical flaws in PHP, the programming language behind a large share of the web, later this month together with a fix. Instead the details leaked on social media, the PHP Foundation rushed out its announcement, and websites around the world started switching themselves off.

In a short report for BBC News at Ten, presented by Jane Hill, cyber correspondent Joe Tidy explains that much of the disruption is deliberate: IT teams are taking sites offline before anyone can break in. Edinburgh Council and the BBC's own Doctor Who site are among his examples, along with organizations in Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands, while outage notices from Bandai Namco and Square Enix appear on screen. The description adds that France and Finland ordered some services shut, and that the US National Security Agency told organizations unable to patch at once to go offline.

The twist is how the flaws were found. Researchers at the firms Calif and Wiz, working in OpenAI's Patch the Planet program, used the most powerful AI models they could get and turned up what Tidy calls "a complex chain of steps at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve." The weaknesses had gone unnoticed for more than a decade. Now, he says, "the bad guys" know about them too, and are using their own AI against sites that have not applied the fix.

On a channel where a Short's first day is usually counted in the tens of thousands, the report passed half a million views in six hours, and it did so on a day when BBC News as a whole was running below its usual pace. A shorter companion clip on the same story drew only a small fraction of that.

The comments arrived roughly ten times faster than on a typical first day. Viewers trade help-desk jokes, mourn the Doctor Who pages, and many point out that the thumbnail spells websites with an extra i.

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The numbers

A two-minute studio report moved far faster than this channel's Shorts usually do, and its comment section filled just as quickly.

the video's first day

usual first day here

28,188

this video

1,439,510

subscribers

20,200,000

no significant change in the last 7 days

total views

7,479,662,403

views per day

2,703,944

typical day: 4,269,795

the video

views

571,234

likes

4,757

comments

1,036

days online

1

subscribers: this channel and similar channels

BBC News

20,200,000

CNN

19,900,000

ABC News

19,900,000

Fox News

15,500,000

Inside Edition

13,800,000

Vox

12,700,000

As of October 22, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.