Is PHP dead in 2026?
Intro
The year is 2026, and people who don't know RUST tell everyone that they should make the agents write more RUST, tech pundits keep telling us that programming will all be over with in the next 3 months, for the last 3 years, while others tell us that we should be 10x engineers or we will be left behind.
Nothing seems to be surprising anymore and, while waiting for my job to go away, I receive a message from a friend. It's an article in some Romanian online mainstream newspaper. To my surprize it's not that we are out of jobs again (as he is also a software engineer), it is about PHP.
The announcement!
I don't think I've ever seen an article in the mainstream media about a programming language before, but my biggest question was why now? For many years already, people are saying that PHP is dead, as I mentioned in my previous article, first time I heard it was about a decade ago.
The story goes that the issue was discovered in August 2026. However, it seems that the issue was there since PHP 5.4 (2012) and considered a known issue with no actions taken to address it, because creating an exploit didn't seem feasible.
While most people focus on how AI found the issue, the most interesting part was actually that AI was able to create an exploit, as we know that the issue has been there for many years. It was even raised again in 2024 with no action taken, because (again) nobody was able to create an exploit using it.
To make things worse, on 20 October it was announced that people should take their sites offline until a fix will be provided. The patch was released the next day but that didn't help with the panic.
The aftermath and conclusion
While bots are probably still probing the internet as we speak, I would have never expected to see so many people still using PHP. I knew it was still popular, but I wasn't expecting this much visibility.
Some of the more well established websites that were taken down as a precaution include: the Dutch government portal, the Danish national school communication platform, the Finnish government public-facing web services, the French Interior Ministry and the Internet Archive.
I think the conclusion is that if you are looking for a popular programming language that it's here to stay, especially if you want to work in the public sector, PHP is the one for you!