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martyb writes:

Continuing Linode's efforts to mitigate the Meltdown/Spectre issues, we have learned that the last of our servers has been scheduled for its first reboot. This time it is hydrogen which, among other things, hosts a copy of our database is one of our web frontends. The reboot is scheduled for tonight, 2018-01-19 @ 05:00 AM UTC (Midnight EST) or approximately 9 hours from the time this story is posted. Our plans are to move hydrogen's workload over to fluorine to cover the load during the hiatus and expect there to be no interruption of service on the site.

Please be aware that Linode considers these reboots to be "Phase 1" of their remediation efforts. We will keep you posted when we learn of other phase(s) being scheduled.

We appreciate your understanding and patience as we deal with this situation.

I recently came upon an article on Ars Technica which revealed that Linode (amongst many, many others) learned of these vulnerabilities at the same time as the rest of us -- when the news hit the press. They had no advance notice with which they could have performed mitigation planning of any kind. That has to count as one of their worst days, ever.

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