PHP extension mysqli causes 503 and “SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can't initialize character set UTF8” errors

Incident Report for CloudLinux

Monitoring

The fix has been released in beta and will be in rollout too.

Please run:
yum update alt-php-config --enablerepo=cloudlinux-updates-testing
alt-php-mysql-reconfigure --verbose

or (a little bit later)
yum update alt-php-config --enablerepo=cloudlinux-rollout-15-bypass
alt-php-mysql-reconfigure --verbose

Posted Jun 26, 2025 - 18:49 UTC

Investigating

After updating packages, sites using mysqli PHP extension get 503 errors or encoding errors like:
SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can't initialize character set UTF8

A possible known workaround is to switch affected sites to use nd_* extensions:
mysql to nd_mysql
mysqli to nd_mysqli
pdo_mysql to nd_pdo_mysql

Currently, we are actively investigating this issue

Posted Jun 26, 2025 - 11:04 UTC

This incident affects: CloudLinux OS Components (Alt-PHP).