Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll doubtlessly know about the Meltdown and Spectre hardware flaws that came to light earlier this week. We were warned that patches designed to address the vulnerabilities could slow down performance, and while they seem to have little impact when it comes to gaming on single systems, multiplayer online titles such as Fortnite are feeling the effects.
Epic Games, creator of Fortnite and Fortnite Battle Royale, posted a message on its forums explaining that the login, server slowdown, downtime, and other "unexpected issues" many players are experiencing are a result of the updates applied to its cloud services that mitigate Meltdown. The company said the post was to provide "a bit more context" for the problems.
Epic also released a chart showing the impact on CPU usage of one of its back-end servers after it was patched. It shows CPU utilization jumping around 20 percent following the application of the Meltdown patches.
"All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability," wrote an Epic Games spokesperson. "We heavily rely on cloud services to run our back-end and we may experience further service issues due to ongoing updates."
For those who regularly enjoy the two Epic titles, the bad news is that the effects of the update are expected to last for as long as a week. The company says it will update the thread with any new information as it arrives. Expect to see other online services, not just gaming-based ones, to be affected in similar ways as a result of the patches.
If you want to find out more about Meltdown and Spectre, check out our 'What you need to know' article. We also have features that show Windows 10 performance before and after the Meltdown emergency patch, along with a deeper look at the performance of a patched desktop system.