Amsterdam’s council documents and meeting calendar went offline on Wednesday 21 October, when the system behind them was shut down as a precaution.
The city uses Notubiz, a platform shared with other municipalities, where residents, journalists and others can read council papers and watch meetings live.
Notubiz’s business unit manager said a warning from PHP arrived that morning, and at 9.30 the company decided to take the site offline to be safe.
She explained that hacking groups had been reported exploiting the weakness on other sites, so the company chose not to take the risk.
The AD reported that companies worldwide are facing cyberattacks targeting weaknesses in the PHP programming language, and several Dutch websites have already gone offline as a precaution.
Notubiz says there is no sign of a breach
Notubiz says there is no indication that its own systems were breached or that hackers are active on them.
A patch for the PHP vulnerabilities was expected at 16.00 that afternoon.
Until then, council papers and live meeting streams could not be viewed.
Check out our guide to how Amsterdam’s city government works.