Sometimes, it’s a Night Shift

Most of what we do for our maintenance client is really benign upkeep work. Some can be automated, such as uptime monitoring and notifications that your domain renewal is due. Other things we do manually.

Every now and then there’s a special situation that requires immediate hands-on work.

Late last night, news broke of two vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language on which the majority of websites (including all WordPress sites) are built – affecting half of the internet. We kept in touch with other agency owners and web developers, keeping each other informed of steps we could do to mitigate the risk while we were all waiting for a new PHP version to be released, and communicating with web hosts.

PHP 8.5.12 release came out in the early morning hours, and now we’re just cleaning up loose ends and checking every site in our care manually to make sure everything is in good shape!

Thankfully, these night shifts are relatively rare. But there have been 5 (I think) such major, worldwide security incidents this year – the frequency is rising, in large part due to AI making it easier to find vulnerabilities.

I feel extremely lucky and forever grateful to have my community of web developers supporting each other through these nights. 🙂