Fortnite is having some login and stability issues, and may continue having them over the next week, due to recent design flaw found in many modern processors.
Recently, it was discovered that Intel processors made in the several years (we're talking upwards of a decade here) have a fatal security flaw at the kernel level. While the technical aspects of the flaw are intricate and jargon-filled, the effect is clear: it would give viruses and other malicious programs access to things like passwords at the system level. In the wake of this discovery, Windows and Linux computers have received numerous patches to address the issue at a cost: processing power.
Although this performance hit mostly does not affect gaming benchmarks, the cut to processing power on CPUs may hinder servers and data centers. Case in point: Epic Games is blaming the fix for the issue, which is called the "Meltdown vulnerability" for recent issues Fortnite users might be experiencing across all platforms.
"All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We heavily rely on cloud services to run our back-end and we may experience further service issues due to ongoing updates," Epic stated on the official Fortnite Forums. The company also posted a chart showing how one of the CPU usage of one of their backend services was affected after it received a patch to address Meltdown.
"Unexpected issues may occur with our services over the next week as the cloud services we use are updated," Epic said. The company is looking into the issue with its cloud-service partners and hopes to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
[Source: Fortnite official forums]
Our Take
This could be the first of several potential server stability issues we see, but it's hard to know at this point. At any rate, it looks like while most users' personal PCs may not be impacted by the Meltdown patch, they may be affected as services like this are affected by the longstanding security flaw.