Who so far from the chip debacle around Meltdown & Specter on his home computer has not yet been affected, he might get caught playing Fortnite. As the Fortnite team announced today, the login problems and server instability problems of the last few days are due to the last update. With this update, the recently discovered security holes, especially Meltdown, have been closed on the servers.
Fortnite team gives insight into the server problems
The updates that have become necessary result in performance losses of up to 30%, depending on the processor. Even if the first benchmarks in practice often resulted in lower values, the huge server farms that are necessary for the operation of online games like Fortnite make it easy for the masses. Even a barely perceptible 0.5% loss of performance can add up to real problems with thousands of chips.
In which other online games we can expect similar problems in the next few days remains to be seen. Fortnite is pretty sure not going to be the only case.
Here is the official statement from Epic:
Epic Services & Stability Update
Attention Fortnite community,
We wanted to provide a bit more context for the most recent login issues and service instability. 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.
Here is a link to an article which describes the issue in depth.
The following chart shows the significant impact on CPU usage of one of our back-end services after a host was patched to address the meltdown vulnerability
Unexpected issues may occur with our services over the next week as the cloud services we use are updated. We are working with our cloud service providers to prevent further issues and will do everything we can to mitigate and resolve any issues that arise as quickly as possible. Thank you all for understanding. Follow our twitter @FortniteGame for any future updates regarding this issue.
Epic suggests following security best practices by always staying up to date with latest patches.
We will continue to update this thread with similar information as it comes to us.
