Major PHP 7 issue affecting WHM

This is a bit of a weird one, so about midnight last night (26/11/24) I was woken up by our Site24x7 monitoring service to several websites going offline to 503 or 404.

I scrambled to my PC to indeed find several sites affected, tried to debug / look into the sites in question but found no error logs and even turning on error reporting there was no error, the websites were just out right broken.

Following usual procedure when weird things like this sometimes happen, I tried restarting Apache, FPM and even MySQL to no avail.

Finally I hit the last resort (now pushing 2am) I decided to reboot the server, which made absolutely no difference.

Debugging sites today one by one we kept cropping up to the same conclusion, any time a file was being opened with fopen() or sometimes read with fread() PHP would just crap out – no error printing, no error logging, just straight to a 503 (if using FPM) or a 500/404 if not using FPM.

This is when things got worse….

So then we realised our other servers were observing the same weird issue. EVERY SERVER. Affecting only sites utilizing the above file functions such as WordPress sites with file based caching and OpenCart sites logging.

There is absolutely nothing about this issue on the internet at the moment, we can only assume that WHM/cPanel have pushed a patch for PHP 7.x which has caused all this trouble.

If we find out anymore information we will update this post! In the meantime if you are having this issue or you know what’s causing it please feel free to drop your comments.

Author: Dean WilliamsProfessional PHP Web Developer with expertise in OpenCart Web Development, WordPress Web Development, Bespoke Systems - also a seasoned Linux Server Administrator.

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