We have this Windows Server 2008 R2 on which a webapplication is running using ZendFramework 2, PHP 5.4.34 and Apache 2.4.3 on which also a SOAP webservice is active.

But after migrating the source code to a Windows 2019 server with a newer PHP 7.4.24, the webservice seems to be faulty and following error message is shown :

[WSDL] SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 'HTTPS://xxx/xxx/xxx/AuthenticateTaskService/V1/auth?wsdl' : failed to load external entity

The code where the webservice is called:

 $soapAuth = new SoapClient("HTTPS://xxx/xxx/xxx/AuthenticateTaskService/V1/auth?wsdl", array('soap_version' => SOAP_1_2, 'trace' => 1, 'exceptions' => true, 'style' => SOAP_DOCUMENT, 'use' => SOAP_LITERAL, 'encoding' => 'UTF-8'));
    var_dump($soapAuth);

I have used both the webservice page on the newer server as the one on the older server, both having the same error.

Does anybody know what might be the cause here? I've searched plenty of StackOverflow and other internet pages, but can't seem to pinpoint the exact cause. I was thinking I might be because of a newer PHP version?