Why The Bothy Devon was offline on 21 October

The Bothy Devon takes the privacy and security of its customers and visitors extremely seriously. This is what happened on 21 October, and what we did about it.

The flaw

On 20 October, the team behind PHP, the software that runs this website and a large share of the world's websites, announced a fix for two critical security flaws, due the next day. The flaws could let an attacker run their own code on a website's server without logging in. On 21 October, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre advised taking websites offline until the fix was installed.

What we did

• We took The Bothy Devon offline at 12:22 UK time on 21 October, as a precaution, before the details of the flaws were made public.
• The fix was released at 14:36. We built it straight away, rather than wait for the usual updates to arrive, and brought the site back on the fixed version.
• In all, The Bothy Devon was offline for 2 hours 38 minutes in all.

Was any information at risk?

We reviewed every request this website received from 20 October until the fix was installed, and found no evidence of any intrusion. The site has been fully up to date with the official fixes since they were released.

We apologise for any inconvenience the outage caused. We would always rather take a site offline for a few hours than leave our customers' data at any risk.

This website is built and looked after by PixelCodeLab.