Fortnite Servers Are Having Problems Due To Intel Vulnerability

If you've been having trouble logging into or playing Fortnite these past few days, you're not alone. Thankfully, Epic has come forward to explain the issues, which are actually beneficial to players in the long run. Recent Intel vulnerabilities have required some extra security measures to be implemented, and those updates are what are causing issues with the game.

Over on the Epic forum, a recent post has explained how updates to cloud services are affecting the game. As you may have heard last week, Intel discovered vulnerabilities tied to Meltdown and Spectre, two particularly nasty ways folks can get into their systems, swipe information and generally make a mess of everything. As a result, updates are being rolled out over the next week to address these holes in the fence. The problem for Fortnite players is that the game is handled through those very cloud-based platforms. In other words, if you've been sitting in queues for an extended period of time or had trouble even playing the game once it launches, you're likely going to be dealing with those same issues for at least a few more days. The good news is that the game, and everything else handled by Intel, should be much more secure once the updates are complete.

It's easy to understand why fans are so upset, though, as Fortnite's Battle Royale kicked off a limited event heading into the weekend. Earlier in the week, silenced pistols and SMGs started popping up in the wild. To celebrate, a "Sneaky Silencers" mode was launched as a limited event. In the mode, players were limited to only those silenced weapons, traps would be disabled and the mischievous "bush" costume would have a "greatly increased" drop rate in the game. In other words, the 100-player answer to PUBG was going to become a super quiet showdown to see who could get the drop on the most players.

Now that Epic has announced the cause of issues in recent days, we wouldn't be surprised if they decide to host the event all over again once things at Intel are smoothed out. Still, fans have done a fair amount of complaining because, well, they wanted to play their game exactly when they wanted to play their game, reasons be damned.

To be clear, these issues also affect the core Fortnite mode, not just PvP. And this is across all platforms, including PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Again, we can't stress enough how necessary a move this was on the part of Intel, and it's probably wise that they not announce anything in advance. Sure, it can be annoying for folks playing games impacted by their cloud servers updating, but Meltdown and Spectre are extremely difficult to detect and combat, and these new measures will hopefully make it so that they never have to be in the first place.