Fortnite downtime blamed on patches for Meltdown vulnerability

While the recent Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities are causing wide-ranging effects on the computing and tech industries as a whole, gamers may start noticing a direct impact on their favorite hobby as well. Fortnite publisher and developer Epic Games has revealed that the multiplayer survival game may start experiencing a number of issues over the next week, including downtime, as the services behind the game are patched.

Among the problems Fortnite and Fortnite Battle Royale players might experience include problems logging in, server slowdown and downtime, and other "unexpected issues." Epic Games says it's doing all it can to address and resolve these issues as they come up, however the game may not be as stable as usual over the next week as they work with their cloud service providers.

"All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability," a rep for Epic Games wrote in their forums. "We heavily rely on cloud services to run our back-end and we may experience further service issues due to ongoing updates."

Like the internet at large, Epic Games and its third-party partners have no choice but to issue Meltdown patches, or else they leave their systems at risk to serious attacks. The problem is that these patches are causing significantly increased processor usage once installed, which in turn impacts the performance of internet services.

Intel has been working hard to get the necessary firmware updates released as quickly as possible, and notes that additional patches down the line should help with performance and workload issues.

SOURCE Epic Games