This IT Home page is stamped 2026/10/22 15:16:04 and cites Bloomberg. From banks to airlines, Japanese companies shut digital services to avoid the risk from a software flaw. The PHP team has disclosed the flaw and shipped a fix. Governments in London, Canberra, and Washington assessed the potential harm on Thursday, and Tokyo joined them. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi posted on X, urging every organization that uses PHP, including government bodies, to install the security fix. Other leaders sent similar reminders. This story records the disclosure, the fix, and who turned what off.
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On Thursday, many internet services in Japan went offline. Users could not open investment accounts, could not pull electronic boarding passes, and could not reach support sites. Parts of the Finance Ministry and Health Ministry pages were shut. Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said at a regular briefing that no attack using this PHP flaw has been confirmed. Finland began shutting some government sites on Wednesday. Central and local government sites in the Netherlands also went offline for a time.
[1]Inside Japan, banking and securities at Mizuho Financial Group paused related services and said they were applying urgent security hardening. Shizuoka Bank shut its site and its phone app. Several MUFG companies paused some online business. ANA turned off Apple Wallet boarding passes and other functions, said it had not found signs of an intrusion, and took the step because some systems use PHP. Japan Airlines took some pages and services down citing maintenance. JR East paused some page services. Japan's 7-Eleven shut its customer-support site, and a spokesperson confirmed that.
[1]A Stack Overflow developer survey shows about 18 percent of respondents still use PHP. A survey of Tokyo Stock Exchange listed companies found that, among those running PHP, 70 percent still use old software whose technical support has ended. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, citing ISC2, puts Japan's cybersecurity talent gap at about 110,000 people. The page says specialists are concentrated in software firms, while finance, retail, and transport often rely on outside vendors to check systems and install fixes. For those firms, the page says, the simplest step was to turn off services that face ordinary users. That is this page's explanation, not a named company list.
[1]Lisa Landau, chief executive of the Tokyo firm ThreatLight, says Japan's infrastructure and the way it manages information technology have had a long-running weakness, so security maintenance is more complicated and can readily interrupt business. The risk of that interruption, in turn, makes firms unwilling to upgrade. She asks why ordinary security maintenance has to stop the business. She argues that once keeping systems safe itself threatens continuity, the problem is no longer a single flaw.
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