Final Fantasy XIV logins are back after a day-long PHP security pause

Final Fantasy XIV stopped accepting new logins on every world on 21 October. Square Enix said it had taken its patch servers offline to add security protections against a critical vulnerability in PHP, the programming language that runs behind a big share of the web.

The PHP project released fixes for two critical flaws on 21 October. The PHP Foundation says both could let an attacker run code on a server without logging in, and it urged anyone running PHP to update now.

Updated patch servers went live on 22 Oct, 12:16pm GMT (22 Oct, 10:16pm AEST), and new logins resumed. Square Enix says the server backup feature for save data is still switched off for the same reason, and it hasn't given a date for its return.

Final Fantasy XIV wasn't the only game affected. Back2Gaming lists emergency maintenance linked to the PHP flaws at Cygames, SEGA and Bandai Namco. Square Enix hasn't said that any player data was affected.