Some American Express customers couldn’t get the company’s website and app to work on Thursday, leading to speculation that it might have something to do with the so-called Black October cybersecurity crisis that’s currently roiling the global internet.
Critical vulnerabilities were recently discovered (and patched) in the PHP programming language. But the issues affect large portions of the internet, and there have been millions of hacking attempts over the past day, according to the CEO of Cloudflare.
Amex told Gizmodo over email that the app and website disruptions for customers on Wednesday “were not caused by a security vulnerability.”
“We’re aware some customers may be experiencing intermittent disruptions to certain functionality on the American Express mobile app and website, which were not caused by a security vulnerability,” a spokesperson for Amex wrote over email. “Wait times to speak to a customer care professional may be longer than usual. We are working to resolve the issue, and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
Gizmodo asked for more information about what may have been behind the trouble. The spokesperson responded the disruptions were “related to an internal technical issue, which now is resolved,” which doesn’t really clarify.
It’s unclear how many people total experienced problems with the Amex website and app, but reports on DownDetector had trickled down to double digits at the time of this writing.
Cybersecurity professionals have taken to calling the ongoing PHP security crisis Black October , and basically every hiccup online now leads to suspicions of a link.
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