Over the last few days, Fortnite players have been experiencing major server issues. Fortnite players who try to log into the game may have found themselves stuck in long queues with waiting times of up to an hour. The issue has been incredibly frustrating for fans and now, developer Epic Games has further explained the server situation.

In a post to its official forums, Epic Games reveals that the company's "cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability." The Meltdown vulnerability that Epic is referring to is a major security flaw in Intel and AMD processors that would allow viruses and other malware to gain access to sensitive data such as passwords. Epic relies "heavily" on cloud services to run its back-end operations, meaning that it's hugely important for the company to issue these updates.

But issuing these Meltdown updates has a "significant impact" on processing power and a graph provided by Epic shows that CPU usage increased by around 40% when a host was patched. It's this that's causing the server issues that are preventing Fortnite players from getting into the game and getting some quick kills without having to wait in lengthy queues beforehand.

Fortnite Meltdown CPU usage

Annoyingly for players eager to jump in the game and test out the new Sneaky Silencers mode, the server issues are expected to continue this week as well. Epic Games warns that "issues may occur with our services over the next week as the cloud services we use are updated," although it is "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."

Understandably, many Fortnite players are upset. The Meltdown issue isn't their fault and they just want to play the game. There are millions of players who enjoy the game, its crafting, base-building, and battle royale gameplay and they could be facing long waiting times throughout the week.

But the Meltdown vulnerability is serious and it's vital that Epic Games fixes it sooner rather than later. Experts have said that it's not safe for people to work on systems that haven't been patched for the issue because doing so runs the risk of leaking sensitive information. Epic certainly won't want its game development secrets blowing in the wind for all to see and a leak of player data would be disastrous too. The sooner this gets sorted, the better.

Fortnite is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: Epic Games