The fixes for the Meltdown CPU vulnerability are currently going out, with experts expecting a noticeable CPU performance hit as a result. Meltdown is one of two major CPU vulnerabilities revealed by Google’s Project Zero. The vulnerability allows a program to read the content of a computer’s memory, including passwords and sensitive data. Unfortunately for gamers, the vulnerability is related to how CPUs squeeze out better performance out of the chips, which means the fix won’t be pretty for those who rely on CPU power, like gamers, video editors, and server owners. Almost all modern Intel CPUs and a handful of ARM chips are affected.
Epic announced the cloud services used by Fortnite were updated yesterday with the Meltdown patch, and the result is an increase of over 50% CPU utilization. The spike in CPU usage is wreaking havoc on the user experience, with login and server stability problems being reported by the community. Epic expects Fortnite’s next few days to be rocky as their cloud services providers make changes to their services in response to the Meltdown fix.
PSA: Our cloud services were affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We rely on cloud services to run our backend and we may experience further service issues in the next few days due to ongoing updates.
Additional info: https://t.co/89nG9wEh8J
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) January 5, 2018
