I have a Vultr server with Ubuntu20.02, PHP8.x, MDB, EasyEngine v4.7 and a dozen or so Wordpress sites on it.

This afternoon I ran the monthly apt update, apt dist-upgrade commands I run every month. Never had a problem in the ten years or so I've been doing this.

But this time all hell has broken loose and I can't for the life of me work out what's going on.

The updates worked as normal, no warnings or errors, just the usual "do you want to keep the existing files" once or twice.

I ran all this in SSH, exited SSH and then restarted the server from Vultr as I always do. The server restarted with no problems at all. But then I started to get Uptime Robot notices of the sites being down. All of them.

I updated EE to 4.7.3 and all the sites came back up except for one, it kept giving me an SSL error. So I created a new server with the backup from a few days ago and eventually got that site up after many issues with EE4 and Letsencrypt SSL's. I eventually deleted it and renewed it with a --force command.

I thought all was well, so I restarted the original server just as a final "reset" this evening and the same thing has happened, all the sites are down and they are all now showing the Apache 2 default page.

I use nginx, not apache, so can I assume the apt updates have installed it ?

I'm really at a loss here and would appreciate any help, I'm happy to pay for it as well.

[e] typos, I'm tired !