Epic Games’ Fortnite and Fortnite Battle Royale may see some service issues over the following days due to cloud updates. While you might be having some issues logging in or playing the game for a little while, the upside is your information will be more secure in the long term.
Announced via Twitter yesterday, Epic Games’ cloud systems are lagging due to updates intended to address Intel’s Meltdown vulnerability. The two titles may be impacted by these updates for as long as a week; Epic has not detailed if this is an exclusive problem to PC, or if it also affects consoles.
PSA: Our cloud services were affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We rely on cloud services to run our backend and we may experience further service issues in the next few days due to ongoing updates.
Additional info: https://t.co/89nG9wEh8J— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) January 5, 2018
Meltdown, and one other vulnerability called Spectre, were discovered by researchers earlier this week in all Intel processors released since 2011. Very simply, these hardware bugs go largely undetected by anti-virus software and are capable of stealing user information. According to Wired, the updates needed to get around these vulnerabilities are already here for Windows, Android, macOS, iOS, Chrome OS, and Linux.
Epic shared this website for more detailed information on what exactly Meltdown and Spectre actually are, who discovered them, and what companies are involved or may have been affected. PCGamer also has a detailed report of these vulnerabilities and how they affect you, your information, and your PC.
More updates regarding Fortnite and Fortnite Battle Royale’s performance during these updates will be announced via the Fortnite Twitter. Epic also has an open forum post about the situation here.
