The Universitat de Barcelona (UB) announced on Wednesday 21st October 2026 that its virtual campus is temporarily inoperable due to a global-scale technical incident affecting critical web infrastructure.

According to a statement from the university's Area of Information and Communication Technologies (ATIC), the outage follows international warnings of a critical vulnerability in the PHP programming language, which underpins a large portion of internet services worldwide.

The company managing the platforms hosting university virtual campuses, including UB's, has taken the decision to shut them down preventively to protect systems and user data. The university confirmed that other institutional services and websites may also be suspended in the coming hours.

As of the latest update, there is no forecast for when the virtual campus will be fully restored. Students and staff are advised to monitor the official UB service alerts page for real-time updates.

Global impact on education systems

The issue has affected institutions beyond Spain. Tampere University in Finland, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Hiroshima University in Japan have all reported temporary outages or access restrictions to their online learning environments, including Moodle platforms.

Multiple national cybersecurity agencies, including the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), have issued urgent advisories urging immediate patching of PHP-based systems.

"The vulnerability poses a severe risk to web applications and could allow remote code execution if left unpatched,"

stated a joint alert published by ENISA, underscoring the seriousness of the flaw.

What this means for users

The outage directly affects thousands of UB students and teaching staff who rely on the virtual campus for course materials, assignments, and communication. While the university has not confirmed whether in-person teaching is disrupted, access to digital resources remains suspended.

Users are advised not to attempt repeated logins and to avoid third-party tools or unofficial workarounds. The university has apologised for the inconvenience and urged patience while technical teams work with external providers to restore services securely.

Further updates will be published via the UB security alerts portal and the university's official news channel.

Primary sources: ub.edu, eb.ub.edu, cert.europa.eu, enisa.europa.eu, cisa.gov, ncsc.gov.uk, tilburguniversity.edu. Reported by lavanguardia.com, my.uva.nl, momiji.hiroshima-u.ac.jp, tuni.fi, bacs.admin.ch, its.unibas.ch, La Vanguardia Barcelona.