Epic Games, developer of the battle royale first-person shooter "Fortnite," has blamed the recent login and server stability issues on the "Meltdown" security patches.
Meltdown is one of two recently-discovered processor security flaws (the other being "Spectre"). This bug reportedly affects most devices made in the past 20 years, especially those that run on Intel processors.
Emergency security patches have been rolled out to attempt to fix and prevent exploitation of the flaw, but the fix carries a problem itself: it apparently makes the central processing unit (CPU) more demanding.
As Epic Games applied the emergency patches on their "Fortnite" servers in an attempt to prevent exploitation, they noticed a massive spike in their CPU workload. This led to server instability and most of their players had issues logging into the game.
They released the charts of the CPU usage before and after the patches. They discovered a 20% increase in CPU usage after applying the fix.
They said that they released the charts so that they could "provide context" as to why players had trouble logging into the game.
A spokesperson for Epic Games also stated that they need to apply the patch even to the computers handling their cloud services.
"All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability," the spokesperson said in an official forum post.
He added that the issues may go on for some time, if not get worse, because the company relies heavily on cloud services for their back end. They announced that players may encounter "unexpected issues" in the following weeks as they try to smoothen the impact of the updates.
"Fortnite" is a battle royale first person game inspired by "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds." In the game, a large number of players are deployed on a map, and each player fights for their own survival.
