Downtrail.

Multiple games - including Final Fantasy 14 and Umamusume: Pretty Derby - have faced outages and other issues following this week's discovery of a serious PHP vulnerability.

This vulnerability could potentially result in substantial security breaches for the massive number of websites and applications built using the PHP programming language. As a result, it was advised that online services built upon it should be taken offline until a fix could be distributed and applied. Inevitably, games were caught up.

An official post made to the Final Fantasy 14 lodestone website informed users that security "enhancements" were being made to the MMO's patch servers. As a result, new logins were temporarily disabled until the updates could be completed. While logins have since been turned back on, the server back-up feature for user's save data remains offline.

Horse racing gacha game Umamusume: Pretty Derby, meanwhile, was taken offline completely. As its server-side infrastructure uses PHP, a sudden maintenance outage was put in place - though its developer assured players no exploitation of the security vulnerability had occurred. Right now, Japanese and global servers are back online, with a compensatory package of in-game currency being sent to all players.

Path of Titans, an in-beta dinosaur MMO (which sounds awesome by the way) is still down as of writing. In an announcement made to its official X account, developer Alderon Games explained the MMOand its website had been taken down for up to three days as a precautionary measure. Players were also assured no data had been compromised.

One hopes the chaos is largely over now a fix is in circulation. But even if it is, the fact that so many services all across the globe - far beyond the games industry - have rushed to protect the sanctity of their data and that of their users speaks to the seriousness of the situation. Take a moment to thank the tech heads out there who may have had to work around the clock to get this sorted.

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