South African presidency website taken offline after global vulnerability
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on Daily Maverick
The South African presidency’s website was taken offline as a precaution after a cybersecurity vulnerability triggered international alerts. The duration of the outage remained unknown on Friday 23 October, while WordPress and the FBI warned of risks linked to the vulnerability, reports Daily Maverick.
The South African presidency’s website was temporarily made inaccessible on Friday 23 October as a precautionary measure, following a global cybersecurity vulnerability. The presidency said on X that the interruption was in response to a “global cybersecurity event”, according to South African outlet Daily Maverick.
The outage was still ongoing several hours later, with no indication of how long it would last, reports Daily Maverick. South African authorities appear to have responded to alerts concerning two critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, which is used by many websites and web applications.
The FBI’s specialised division warned on Wednesday that these flaws, listed as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, could allow malicious actors to execute code remotely and compromise data or networks. The FBI recommends that organisations immediately update affected installations or take systems offline until they are secured, reports Daily Maverick.
