Kathmandu, Oct. 25 -- Thousands of government and banking websites in Nepal have been taken offline as a precaution after two critical security vulnerabilities were discovered in PHP, a programming language widely used to build and run websites.

The PHP Foundation, which maintains the language, disclosed the vulnerabilities and released security patches on October 21. Websites began going offline around the world as governments, financial institutions and other organisations moved to protect their systems against potential attacks.

In Nepal, thousands of government websites run on a shared template, allowing authorities to take them offline centrally. As a result, web portals operated by ministries, departments, commissions and other go...