Intel's Meltdown And Spectre Firmware Fix Is Causing Unexpected System Rebooting

Roughly a week ago, Intel started rolling out the first firmware updates aimed at mitigating any security issues surrounding both Meltdown and Spectre. However, almost immediately, customers began experiencing issues with their systems rebooting unexpectedly. The issue was first brought to the public sphere through an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday afternoon.

After the article was published, Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, issued a statement addressing the matter. "We have received reports from a few customers of higher system reboots after applying firmware updates," said Shenoy. "Specifically, these systems are running Intel Broadwell and Haswell CPUs for both client and data center. We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue."

According to Shenoy, Intel will most likely be pushing out revised firmware (sans unexpected rebooting) through its "normal channels", and is in direct contact with its data center customers regarding the issue.

We should note that Intel is not the only company have issued with patches for Spectre and Meltdown. Microsoft issued Spectre patches last week for systems running on AMD processors, however, some users had their systems bricked by the patch. Microsoft in return blamed AMD for the mishap, citing poor documentation.

"We are working closely with them to correct an issue that paused the distribution of patches for some older AMD processors (AMD Opteron, Athlon and AMD Turion X2 Ultra families) earlier this week," said AMD's Mark Papermaster in response. "We expect this issue to be corrected shortly and Microsoft should resume updates for these older processors by next week."