Rough Week for Portal Tech as Rightmove and Lifull HOME'S Go Dark

Portals in the UK and Japan both went down yesterday, and neither was due to an issue on their part.

In London, a power failure at Google's data centres disrupted Rightmove from early morning. Google flagged the incident on its europe-west2 service dashboard at around 7am BST, blamed a "power event" and said most services had recovered by mid-afternoon.

Large companies such as Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Revolut, DPD and the NHS app were also hit.

A Rightmove spokesperson told Property Industry Eye: "Technical issues affecting Google Cloud Platform across Europe impacted some of our logged-in services. These issues have now been resolved and all services are operating as normal."

That evening, Lifull HOME'S, Japan's number two portal, put its site into emergency maintenance from around 9 pm Japan time. The trigger was the disclosure of two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language behind a large share of the web. Lifull called the shutdown a precaution and said it had found no unauthorised access or data leak. Rival At Home also posted an emergency maintenance notice.

The Japanese portals went down alongside Rakuten Ichiba, niconico and parts of the Japan Meteorological Agency's site, as operators across the country rushed to patch.

The flaws, dubbed "php2shell", were found by security researchers using AI models from OpenAI and Google. The PHP Foundation released an emergency patch and urged sites to apply it immediately or go offline until they could. Wiz, one of the firms behind the discovery, said 70% of the internet was affected.

As Property Industry Eye noted, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare supply much of the same infrastructure to businesses worldwide, so one failure can take down many unrelated services and portals are no exception.