U.S. equities opened higher on Oct 21 (Wed): Dow Jones +70.65 pts (+0.13%) to 52,566.53; S&P 500 +21.29 pts (+0.28%) to 7,733.86; Nasdaq Composite +156.55 pts (+0.59%) to 26,581.37.

Meta Platforms (META.O) guides Q4 revenue of $73.0–76.0 billion, versus consensus $73.73 billion.

PHP development team disclosed two severe security vulnerabilities Tuesday and released a patched version Wednesday after reports of active exploitation, urging users to update immediately. Operators preemptively took numerous sites offline to protect systems, including the Port of Rotterdam website, Dutch government portal Overheid.nl, the Dutch football association, five major Dutch party sites and several hospital websites. PHP underpins a large share of the web (W3Techs: ~75% of sites with identifiable server-side languages use PHP; ~43% of sites run on WordPress), expanding the attack surface for e-government portals, CMS-driven media, e-commerce platforms and hosted services and raising the risk of short-term online service disruptions.