Fornite Players Report Not Being Able To Log-in, Epic Games Explains Regarding Meltdown CPU Exploit

Many Fortnite players are reporting the inability to log in as Epic Games continues to try to protect their servers against the major Meltdown CPU exploit. Unfortunately, the company's actions in an order to be proactive against this exploit have caused a lot of issues from players all over, as the team took to Twitter to let fans know that they are working on the issue ASAP:

We acknowledge that players currently cannot login to Fortnite and are running into an error message. We've got the team looking into this now.

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) January 5, 2018

In a recent blog update from Epic, they had this to say:

Attention Fortnite community,

We wanted to provide a bit more context for the most recent login issues and service instability. All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We heavily rely on cloud services to run our back-end 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. Thank you all for understanding. Follow our twitter @FortniteGame for any future updates regarding this issue.

Epic suggests following security best practices by always staying up to date with latest patches.

• General Recommendations for Computer Security

It appears that the log-in block is sporadic, and many are reporting that they can get into the game perfectly fine at random moments. Fortnite isn't the only game that will be affected by this Meltdown either, we'll keep you posted on any other major reported outages. Until then, here's more about what the Meltdown issue actually is, courtesy of PC Gamer:

"Meltdown is an exploit that affects Intel CPUs at least since 2011, which leverages elements of out-of-order execution to cause a change in the cache state of a CPU, and then use that to dump contents of memory that should normally be inaccessible. It may affect many other CPUs as well, basically anything that uses OOOE, which includes all Intel CPUs back to the original Pentium Pro (excluding Itanium and Atom before 2013), and AMD CPUs from a similar time period. While the current full implementation of Meltdown does not work on AMD and ARM CPUs, there are indications that further modification of the code could allow a similar attack to work on AMD and ARM processors. The KPTI (and similar) patches that have been deployed for Windows, OS X, and Linux largely mitigate the problem, though there are still some less critical remaining concerns.

It's important to note that many of these exploits aren't actually new. From the whitepaper, "The fact that hardware optimizations can change the state of microarchitectural elements, and thereby imperil secure software implementations, is known since more than 20 years. Both industry and the scientific community so far accepted this as a necessary evil for efficient computing." What has changed is that Meltdown is a working attack vector on many Intel CPUs. The good news is that all the major operating systems should already be patched to mitigate problems."