Fortnite and Fortnite Battle Royale performance has been spotty over the past few hours and could remain that way for the next week or so. In a recent reddit post from Epic Games, sources at the game’s development team suggested Intel’s Spectre and Meltdown flaws are the root of the instability.
An excerpt of the post is below:
“All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We heavily rely on cloud services to run our backend and we may experience further service issues due to ongoing updates. 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.”
As you can see in the embedded graph, the recent CPU usage from this particular host has been pretty erratic over the past few days. After dropping to a complete trough on Thursday, the usage numbers are now on an uncontrolled spike. As such, all cloud services working from that server are liable to act in abnormal ways.
In terms of what this technical hiccup might mean for Fortnite and Battle Royale players, the effects have been varied. While some players across all platforms haven’t been able to connect to the game or are plagued by extended queue times, others have reported gameplay-specific problems such as glitches with doors and unpredictable framerate drops. As an online service game, Fortnite handles many of its core gameplay tasks in the cloud. When that cloud environment is disrupted, there’s a lot that can potentially go wrong.
As troubling as some of these issues have been, Epic continues to be transparent with fans via the official Fortnite Twitter account. At the time of writing service has been partially restored, but studio sources say there could be more outages of this caliber in the days ahead.
For those not in the know, Intel’s Meltdown and Spectre flaws made headline news earlier this week after the discovery was reported by several prominent research firms. The simplest version of the story is that a bug in Intel CPUs potentially gave outside parties access to critical system data while processors cycled to prepare for future tasks.
Equally as controversial as the flaw itself were the updates required to fix it. Most traditional tasks like gaming and application use have experienced little to no performance loss after patching, but servers have been hit more significantly. As a result, games that use them, like Fortnite, may be acting in subpar ways for a little while.
Those who can connect to Fortnite, however, are encouraged to try the brand new silenced pistol in the limited Sneaky Silencers game mode.
Fortnite is available now on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
Have you been having issues logging into Fortnite or Battle Royale over the past few hours? Are you happy with Epic’s response to player concern? Tell us in the comments section!
