Vienna residents trying to access Town Council meeting recordings and agendas online will find error messages instead.

The Town of Vienna confirmed Wednesday, Oct. 21, that its web-services provider, Granicus, temporarily shut down platforms that host meeting audio, agendas and video streaming. The shutdown came after the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) warned of critical security flaws in PHP, a programming language used in web development.

"In response to the identified PHP security vulnerabilities, Granicus has notified us that it has temporarily taken PHP-based meeting, agenda management and video streaming platforms offline, and the company is actively working on remediating the situation," town spokesperson Karen Thayer told FFXnow, which first reported the outage.

Thayer said Granicus is posting status updates on a dedicated webpage. As of the afternoon of Oct. 21, Granicus said service restoration was underway and several solutions had been restored, with full operations expected within 24 hours.

The nearby City of Fairfax was hit by the same outage. Fairfax City spokesperson Matthew Kaiser told FFXnow the provider said the problem would be resolved within 24 hours and that no breach, malicious activity or exploitation had been detected.

Granicus echoed that on its status page, stating there is no known breach of its systems and no indication of malicious activity.

Why the platforms went down

The PHP Foundation on Oct. 21 released emergency patches for two critical vulnerabilities, rated 9.2 out of 10 in severity, according to ABC News. PHP powers an estimated 70% of websites worldwide, including WordPress. The flaws could let attackers remotely execute code on servers running PHP, potentially compromising sensitive data.

The FBI's cyber division urged all affected organizations to update immediately or take systems offline. The NSA issued a similar warning, according to The Hill.

Granicus followed that guidance, pulling down platforms it identified as potentially vulnerable.

AI discovered the flaw

Artificial intelligence tools helped uncover the flaws before attackers could exploit them, according to Fortune. The bug had lurked in PHP's code for 14 years. Multiple security organizations independently found the vulnerabilities in August using AI models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said, according to The Hill.

OpenAI said it led a coalition of researchers, security firms and PHP developers to prepare fixes over the past two months. The company called the flaws "one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory," as reported by FFXnow.

Governments in the Netherlands, Finland and Japan also took websites offline or issued warnings, Fortune reported.

What Vienna residents should know

Attempting to access the audio recording of the Town Council's Oct. 19 work session on the town's Legistar calendar produced an error message as of Oct. 21, FFXnow reported.

The town's next scheduled council meeting is Monday, Oct. 26, at 7:30 p.m. at Charles Robinson Jr. Town Hall, 127 Center St. South. Whether meeting recordings will be fully restored by then depends on how quickly Granicus completes its fixes.