Intel Bug Causes Fortnite Servers To Glitch, Epic Games Says

Well, it seems the Meltdown vulnerability that was recently discovered in Intel chips really is having an effect on the gaming community, but not in the way that a lot of people feared. Instead of significantly slowing down individual PCs, the bug messed up Epic Games’ Fortnite servers. This led to many players unable to play the game’s online feature during the last several days.

As Engadget notes, the Meltdown bug in Intel’s chips is expected to have long-term consequences in the tech industry over the weeks to comes. In the case of PC Gaming, at least one title experienced a clear impact of the vulnerability when Fortnite’s servers saw downtime.

The Battle Royale aspect of the game was particularly problematic, which Epic blamed on the increased CPU load that its third-party partners for running the cloud service had to contend with. Fixes are already being developed, but the developers warn of more issues that might crop up over the coming days.

The fix that Intel is also promising to deliver is intended to patch the vulnerability of its chips, but it’s also feared to cause major slowdowns when performing certain tasks. Benchmarks performed to test the effects of the patch have been encouraging, but it seems the issue is more far-reaching than the community expected.

Coming back to the server issues of Fortnite Battle Royale, many gamers were outraged over the problems due to the special event that was scheduled for the weekend, Cinemablend reports. The developers were throwing in silencers into the game to make things more interesting, but with so many players unable to log in, the event wasn’t as successful as Epic might have hoped.

In any case, the developers have promised to spare no effort in addressing the glaring problem. Even so, gamers are advised to expect unforeseen issues in the meantime.