AWS, Google, and Microsoft promise their clouds are mostly protected from processor flaw

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and other cloud providers inform customers that they may experience downtime and performance degradation as a result of an urgent effort to correct critical errors found in many computer processors.

The errors, known as Specter and Meltdown, were revealed today after a report by The Register. They are caused by microprocessor design issues that could potentially allow malicious code to read the contents of a computer's kernel memory. These issues greatly affect the Intel chips that power the overwhelming majority of servers in the cloud running, but other processors, including some designed by AMD and Arm, appear to be affected.

These three major cloud providers have revealed to users that some of them were cryptographically informed about the downtime scheduled late last year as part of the first efforts to implement patches for counter the error. These efforts, initially silent and progressive, have accelerated after the official disclosure of the errors today.

AWS stated in a statement that the overwhelming majority of instances of virtual machines running in its fleet are protected, and the rest receive updates within hours of this notification. Google has already updated its G Suite productivity service and cloud platform to protect users. Microsoft said most of its Azure infrastructure has been updated to protect itself from vulnerabilities, but some customers will still have to spend some time to protect themselves.

However, the owners of the platforms that update the underlying infrastructure on which their clients' workloads are running are only half the battle: users will also need to update their operating systems . Microsoft is expected to release patches for Windows as part of its next patch cycle on Tuesday, as other operating systems remove patches.

Customers can see slowdowns with their workloads because the root cause of the problem is related to speculative execution, a technique used by processors to improve performance. The Microsoft blog said that most of its customers should not see a significant impact on the performance of updates implemented to mitigate errors, but some will see degraded network performance.