Wednesday, October 21, 2026

ISFDB downtime starting October 21, 2026

For the last couple of weeks malicious bots have been hammering the ISFDB server almost non-stop, which made it effectively unavailable except when the bots took brief breaks.

 

On top of that, earlier today we learned that the PHP programming language, which is used by the ISFDB Wiki as well as by millions of other Web sites, has a crucial vulnerability. We have taken the site down and will be working on patching PHP. It won't address the bot problem, but at least it will address the security issue.

This post will be updated once PHP is patched.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for keeping everyone in the loop. I hope you can get back online soon.

Ahasuerus said...

We are working on it, but it's one of those things where the released emergency patch requires certain components to be upgraded first and then you find out that those components have other prerequisites and so on and so forth. With luck it won't take too long...

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing, I was wondering about the cause. ISFDB is a valuable resource, keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

Looking forward to the site being available again. I use it multiple times a week. Thanks for providing it!