The Broome County government website has been taken offline. WSKG first noticed the outage on Friday. After 3 p.m. on Friday, Broome County Executive Jason Garnar issued a statement.
He said the decision to shutdown the website was made “out of an abundance of caution” while the county’s IT and information security teams respond to “a cybersecurity vulnerability affecting website software used by 70% of websites worldwide.”
Garnar said “precautionary steps” are being taken to make the website safe before it will be restored.
He said anyone trying to reach county services should call the department directory at 607-778-8000. Most county offices close at 4 p.m. and are not open on weekends.
The FBI warned on Wednesday of a vulnerability in the programming language used by 70 percent of websites across the world.
The flaw was discovered with AI assistance in the software language known as PHP. It is an essential component of the public-facing part of many websites. The PHP Foundation released patches and instructions on Wednesday.
The problem is affecting government websites worldwide including in Canada, some European countries and Japan are also offline.
As of late Friday afternoon, Garnar did not say when the Broome County website will be back online.