Recent Announcements and Security Updates on the Maastricht University Website

Updated

Maastricht University (UM) has posted two notable recent announcements on its homepage news feed: a security update affecting its websites and systems, and a Public Prosecution Service statement about a student's Instagram post. The security notice says UM carried out updates on its main websites and systems in response to vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, and that most platforms were accessible again. Both items appear under the "News and stories" section of maastrichtuniversity.nl, which is where such institutional announcements are published.

The security update notice

According to the homepage news item dated 21 October 2026, UM carried out security updates on its main websites and systems in response to vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used across large parts of the internet. The notice states that most of the platforms are accessible again.

What this tells a visitor:

  • Scope: the update covered UM's main websites and systems, not a single service.
  • Cause: vulnerabilities in PHP, described as widely used across the internet rather than as a UM-specific flaw.
  • Current status: most platforms were accessible again at the time of the notice. The wording "most" means some services may still have been affected, so if a specific UM platform fails to load, this notice is the context to check first.

The page does not list which individual platforms were down or give a completion time for all systems, so the notice should be read as a status summary rather than a full incident report.

The statement on a student's Instagram post

A second news item, dated 2 October 2026, reports that the Public Prosecution Service announced on Friday 2 October that no criminal offences had been committed in connection with a video posted on social media by a UM student from Gaza. The item records the prosecution service's conclusion; it does not reproduce the video or set out the legal reasoning behind the decision.

Where these announcements live

Both items sit in the "News and stories" block on the UM homepage, alongside research and institutional news. That section is the practical place to check for:

  • security and system-status notices;
  • official statements involving the university or its students;
  • research funding and award announcements, such as the four Vidi grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), totalling 850,000 euros, reported on 22 October 2026.

The homepage also links to a fuller "More news and stories" page, which is the better entry point when you need older items rather than the latest few.

How to use this if you are checking whether UM systems are working

  1. Open maastrichtuniversity.nl and look at the "News and stories" block for a dated security or systems notice.
  2. Read the date and wording carefully: a notice saying most platforms are accessible again indicates recovery, not a guarantee that every service is back.
  3. If a specific platform still fails, treat the notice as background and retry later rather than assuming a new outage.

The site itself does not publish a live status dashboard in the material available here, so the news feed is the main public signal.