Comment Before your code even runs (Score 4, Interesting) 60
The detail that jumps out in PHP's advisory is that the demonstrated mod_php exploit can trigger before any application code runs. Your application's login screen and carefully written input validation never get a vote. Under those circumstances, a PHP-generated "down for maintenance" page could still leave you exposed. Taking a site offline while sorting that out seems entirely reasonable. An outage is visible and embarrassing, which makes it easy to criticize. A compromised server might keep serving perfectly normal pages while somebody helps themselves to the data. The fixed releases are now available. What I'd want to hear afterward is how quickly each organization could identify its PHP installations and get the fixes deployed. If answering "where do we run this?" requires an emergency meeting and somebody's old spreadsheet, there's another problem waiting for the next advisory.