As covered widely in the news yesterday, the government announced yesterday that some sites were to be temporarily taken offline following advice from NCSC (ncsc.gov.uk) regarding the critical security issue affecting PHP, in the news on 22 October, 2026. PHP is estimated to power approximately 80% of the web. For example, Wordpress alone powers over 40% of websites and it relies on PHP.
Today some .gov.uk sites operating slowly and some showing 502 bad gateway (nginx/1.18.0) error messages, possibly linked to the same issue as it is likely that some individuals and/or groups are trying to exploit the issue or simply increasing load on the servers by testing for vulnerabilities. Often pressing refresh and being patient, sometimes several times, does the trick.
source: PennySaver.org.uk