Websites taken offline across UK & Europe as ‘critical’ security flaw hits dozens of government sites

Source: MyJoyOnline · 2026-10-21T15:01:00.000Z · Politics

Edinburgh and Oxford Council as well as the online home for The Traitors were taken down as was The Met Police website. According to internet monitoring website Down Detector online gaming platform Steam, Google Drive and Wordpress were all down alongside a raft of local authority websites. Error messages were displayed on the Bristol, Lambeth and Barnet council websites. Finland has temporarily shut down the government's public web services, while the Netherlands' cyber-security agency said it was taking its own website offline due to the vulnerabilities. It comes after the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) urged UK organisations to prepare for emergency updates to software used to run websites around the world, amid fears hackers could exploit the weaknesses to break into their systems.

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