Children's Hospital Website Down: Appointments Available by Phone

The website of the Children's Clinical University Hospital (BKUS) in Riga, bkus.lv, is currently not working, so appointments with a pediatrician in urgent situations, both in person and for remote consultations, are being handled by the free phone line 80708866, according to information published by the hospital. The outage is tied to a wider cybersecurity situation in Latvia: after critical vulnerabilities were found in the PHP programming language, access to a number of government websites was restricted.

How to book

Call centre staff answer calls until 5 p.m. The number can be used to book or cancel visits and to ask other questions. The hospital says it is working with the responsible organisations to ensure that, once restored, the website is secure and not affected by possible cyber risks. It apologises for the inconvenience. The websites of Austrumu Hospital, Stradins Hospital and Riga 1st Hospital are working.

What happened to state websites

On Wednesday evening, access to many state institution websites was restricted. The State Chancellery said access to the Unified Web Platform (TVP), which hosts 165 websites of state institutions and municipalities, was suspended temporarily. Madara Krutova, a spokesperson for Cert.lv, the cyber incident response body, said security updates had been installed on the platform and the sites are again reachable from Latvia, though some resources still face restrictions from abroad. Lsm.lv, 112.lv and Latvija.gov.lv have also been restored within Latvia. At about 9 a.m. this morning, websites and apps maintained by VSIA Latvijas Vestnesis, including Likumi.lv, were still unavailable.

About the vulnerabilities

Two critical flaws in PHP (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) are rated 9.2 out of 10. They could let an attacker run commands on a system without authentication. About 6,000 potentially affected resources have been identified in Latvia, only a few hundred of them in the public sector. Automated attempts to exploit the flaws have been detected, but there are no reports of successful attacks. Cert.lv urges companies to check their systems and install security updates.