Do you have access to telnet? If so you can get more information be doing ls -l to see the files. I think your suspicion about the the owner of the files changing is likley. I don't know of a php command to do chmoding, and I suspect it doesn't exist since php is platform-inspecific. However, I'm sure I've seen some code before that runs system commands from within PHP. If I am right, this will allow you the ability to change the rights back.
Commands that will be useful in order of userfulness:
- chown username filename
- chgrp groupname filename
- chmod attributeVal filename
I think this method would be your best bet. Otherwise it would probably be worth getting your admin to fix it up for you, but depending on your server admin, they probably won't take kindly to doing this kind of thing often.