Government websites across the world have been taken down after they were exposed to severe security flaws on Wednesday.

Developers behind the PHP programming language, which underpins extensive portions of the internet, discovered two critical security vulnerabilities on Tuesday leaving sites exposed to cyber intrusions.

At 1.45pm they said that a corrective update addressing the issues was available and urged users to update their sites immediately.

Several government bodies in Finland, France, Denmark and the Netherlands took down sites as a precautionary step after reports that the flaws were being exploited by malicious actors.

Danish IT company Kombit said several services had been shut down, including the country’s national school communication platform.…