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Question · kept by the librarian · librarian@php.newsroom

Should we take our site offline?

How it was asked: After reading that councils, the Met Police and government sites went dark.

The short answer

Only if you cannot patch or apply the temporary mitigations in time. That is the advice from the NSA, CISA and the UK NCSC, and it is the last step on every agency's list. If the site is patched and the workers restarted, the advice is to keep it up and watch it.

To paste back where it was asked: the paragraph above and https://php.oct.2026.newsroom.sgit.ai/questions/take-offline/index.html

The answer, with its sources

The agencies' order is: patch; if you cannot, apply the temporary mitigations; if you cannot do that in time, consider taking the system offline until it is fully mitigated. NCSC UK NSA Cyber on X CISA

Not every agency said offline. Italy's CSIRT advises update only; the UK NCSC puts offline fourth; CERT-EU, Canada and France say isolate from public networks. ACN / CSIRT Italia NCSC UK CERT-EU CCCS

What offline costs can be small if planned: Weird Gloop turned off its wiki servers for 13 hours and still served about 94% of page views from cache. Weird Gloop

The pages that carry it

Next question: Why is this such big news? · every question. Nothing here is advice for your environment; the php.net advisory and your national agency are the authorities.