When PHP was upgraded to version 5.4.45 on the 17th Feb the wp-top-10-plugins.com site took a dive. It’s just resurfaced again today.

Even though the plugin called gtrans had been dropped from WordPress some time ago the plugin was still active on this site. Code in gtrans produced the following Fatal error

[17-Feb-2016 14:43:20 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  
Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in 
/home/rcwdcom/public_html/wp-content/plugins/gtrans/gtrans.php on line 40

This led to Apache returning a 500 internal error.

I only just noticed today, even though I’d reported to my hosting company that none of my sites were working.

From: herb miller 
At: 17/Feb/2016 15:30

Is there something wrong with ns1.qukstrb2.net ?
I can't get to any sites that are hosted on it.

When I chased them for an explanation their reply didn’t directly mention anything to do with upgrading PHP. It said “There was an issue with how CloudLinux and the PHP selector were maintaining the alternative PHP binaries, they all had to be updated to resolve the issue.”.