All school websites across the Isle of Man have been temporarily taken offline as a precautionary measure.

The Isle of Man Government confirmed the move on Wednesday afternoon (at around 4.35pm), saying it followed published advice from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

The websites will remain offline while urgent security patches are applied to address identified vulnerabilities.

The move comes amid international warnings over two critical security vulnerabilities discovered in the PHP programming language, which powers a large proportion of websites.

The BBC has reported that cyber-security agencies, including the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), have urged organisations to apply urgent fixes, advising those unable to do so to consider taking their websites offline until the issues are resolved.

Websites operated by several organisations internationally have also been taken offline amid the warnings, although not all have confirmed a link to the vulnerabilities.

The Isle of Man Government has not confirmed whether the decision to take local school websites offline is directly connected to the PHP security flaws.

In a statement, the government apologised for any inconvenience caused and said it would provide an update once the work had been completed.

It reads: ‘All school websites across the Isle of Man have been temporarily taken offline as a precaution.

‘This follows published advice from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and the sites will remain offline while urgent security patches are applied to address identified vulnerabilities.’

It has not yet been confirmed how long the websites are expected to remain offline.