As you might have noticed, viaLibri was offline for ten hours yesterday. In all the time I’ve been working for viaLibri I can’t remember a time when we’ve had to take the website down for that long.

We weren’t alone. As widely reported in the news, a vulnerability had been discovered in PHP, the programming language that powers viaLibri and (according to some estimates) over 70% of websites on the internet. Unusually, details of the flaw were shared widely before a fix had been released. Following the advice of several government agencies we decided to take the site offline until a patched version of PHP became available.

We realise this was a disruptive move for all of you, but the situation left us few alternative options. The vulnerability was so severe that it would have granted any attacker unfettered access to our servers, and the databases connected to them. We felt that protecting your data was more important than keeping the site online, and we hope you understand.

All our servers are now fully patched. We have checked our logs and found no sign of unauthorised access. As far as we can tell, your data is safe.