Dozens of government services are offline after they were hit by a major cyber-security issue affecting millions of sites worldwide.
A total of 32 government services are temporarily offline and four are partially unavailable, ministers confirmed on Thursday morning.
No 10 said no major public-facing critical services have been impacted by the issue which concerns a severe vulnerability identified in the PHP programming language used by almost 70 per cent of sites.
And a cabinet minister has insisted that next week’s Budget has not been compromised after the website for the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the official spending watchdog, was affected.
Organisations around the world have been scrambling to address the flaw in PHP, which powers almost 70 per cent of websites according to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare. UK cybersecurity chiefs alerted organisations to the "critical security issue" on Wednesday.
A No 10 spokeswoman said on Thursday: "Work has already taken place across government to identify and fix potential exposures to our systems, and our experts are continuing to work closely with both OpenAI and international partners on this issue.
"No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out.
"But this does not mean they were hacked, and work continues to resolve any issues."
She added that it was not "standard practice" to detail which specific government services had been affected.
Douglas Alexander, the secretary of state for Scotland, has said businesses concerned about the PHP issue should visit the NCC website, but the budget has not been compromised after the OBR website shutdown.
“This is not a breach of government systems,” he told Times Radio.
“My suggestion would be if there are any businesses listening to this programme who are worried about their websites or other organisation, visit the website of the National Centre for Cybersecurity. That's where advice can be offered.”
Asked about the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) taking its site offline, he added: “I've had no indication whatsoever that there's any problem in terms of breach of budget security… historically there was vulnerabilities around the OBR forecasting process and the security of its website. Those have been addressed.”
He added: “If you like, AI both identified this problem and potentially has a contribution to make to its resolutions. So in that sense, it's right to acknowledge that this is a time when a lot of questions are being asked of AI. It has the potential to contribute to medical trials. It has the potential to raise productivity. But it's also showing vulnerabilities in systems that without AI might have gone undisturbed for many years.”
Emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services across the globe have revealed how much public and corporate systems rely on the software, and how hard it is to fix such flaws quickly once they are made public.
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