New Delhi, Oct. 22 -- Governments and companies around the world shut down websites as they raced Thursday to protect themselves from hacks after artificial intelligence uncovered critical flaws in a widely used programming language called PHP.

The discovery has triggered international advisories and forced websites offline worldwide, marking a new phase in cybersecurity in which increasingly powerful AI can uncover software vulnerabilities that humans have missed for years.

PHP, which originally stood for "personal home page" but is now known as "hypertext preprocessor," is a foundational programming language that sits beneath popular web design platforms. It helps run approximately 70 to 75% of all websites globally, spanning from onl...