Security maintenance: Short interruptions possible on PHP-based services

Incident Report for Fasthosts

Identified

What’s happening?
A critical security gap has been found in PHP, a technology used by many websites and web applications worldwide. The PHP developers and national security authorities have issued urgent warnings and recommend installing the security update immediately, as attacks are expected within hours.
To protect you and your data, we’re installing the security update across our systems right now. We expect to be finished within the next 24 hours.

What does this mean for you?
While we update our systems, some websites and services may be slow or briefly unavailable. We’re taking this step to protect you.

If you run a self-managed application, for example on a VPS or Bare Metal Server, please install the PHP security update as soon as possible to protect your systems. You can find more information here: https://www.php.net/

Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Posted Oct 21, 2026 - 16:10 BST
This incident affects: Control Panels (Control Panel) and Hosting (Webhosting, WordPress Hosting).