Vivek Sarje / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cropped.
More than 30 Madhya Pradesh government department websites have stayed offline for about a week, and the IT department says essential public sites may take another four to five days to return. The shutdown lands in Diwali week, when citizens often need revenue records, recruitment notices and other online services.
Departments listed as affected include Government Press, Jail, Revenue, Energy, Industry, Cooperation, Minerals, Food and Social Justice. After an advisory from the Madhya Pradesh Computer Emergency Response Team, security checks found many sites running old PHP versions and outdated servers. Officials say portals were taken offline to apply patches, upgrade technical stacks and move some services to cloud hosting, so potential hacking and data theft could be blocked.
This was framed as a preventive step, not proof of a successful breach. In late October, Free Press Journal reported that the National Informatics Centre had issued a critical PHP security advisory, and MP CERT joint director Vaibhav Shrivastava said no damage had been reported in the state till then. Earlier coverage also described temporary closures and staged restorations after the same alert.
IT principal secretary M. Selvendran said open-source PHP sites are being shifted to government secure bandwidth, and that privately built departmental sites are also being replaced. He linked the urgency to artificial intelligence making web security harder. Revenue work, hiring information and public notices have already been disrupted while the sites remain dark.
For residents, the story is not only a technical advisory. Festival-week services depend on portals the state has chosen to keep offline until patches and migrations finish. Officials say restoration will be phased; Saturday's update did not publish a full public list of live versus closed URLs.
Hashtags: #ApnaBhopal #CyberSecurity #MPGovernment #PHP #Diwali #CitizenServices #WebsitesOffline #MPCERT #CyberAlert #MPGovernmentWebsitesOffline
