Website stopped working v 8.5.5

[diemae]

One of my customer’s site stopped working a couple of days ago.
Error displayed on https://laser-clinic.be
SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can’t initialize character set utf8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/)

Tried to change the following file:
/concrete/config/database.php

Changes:
// The preferred database character set (derived from preferred_collation if empty)
‘preferred_character_set’ => ‘utf8mb3’,

// The preferred database collation (derived from preferred_character_set if empty)
'preferred_collation' => 'utf8mb3_unicode_ci',

// The fallback database character set to be used when the preferred one can't be applied
'fallback_character_set' => 'utf8',

// The fallback database collation to be used when the preferred one can't be applied
'fallback_collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',

This didn’t help.
Can anybody help out?

[JohntheFish]

This is probably a question for your host support team. Have they recently updated MySQL or PHP versions?

[diemae]

Thanks for your reply.
Nothing had been changed if I can trust the customer. Meanwhile we finally got somebody from the hosting company on the phone and they succeeded in fixing things fast. No idea what the cause was because I didn’t talk to them unfortunately.
Thanks again for trying to help.

[mesuva]

This has happened to me a few times recently, I have a feeling there’s a cPanel upgrade that has caused this.

What I’ve done is:

• look at the database in phpmyadmin, and take note of collation that the tables are running on. E.g.
  
  
• I’ve then gone to the config file at /application/config/database.php, and I’ve changed the charset value from ‘utf8’ to match the charset of the collation. In the case of my screenshot, I’ve changed it to ‘utf8mb3’
• after saving that, the site has then come back up and operated as normal

[diemae]

Thanks for that interesting feedback. Good to know for the future.
Meanwhile the hosting company solved it yesterday. No idea how though.