Tuesday morning I discovered an overnight ETL process hosted on an Azure IaaS instance had aborted. Yesterday, I was told that Microsoft rebooted our Azure hosted servers in the process of applying some emergency patch. I'm guessing this was it.
Yup, everything that my company runs/manages on Azure got rebooted. I believe it was originally scheduled for next week (when the official disclosure was supposed to happen), but careless words from AMD lead to the details of the bugs leaking early, hence the emergency patches.
Actually, folks keeping an eye on the Linux kernel development figured it out before most. Rumors have been drifting around for a few weeks.
And several years ago, there are a few smart folks predicting this exact bug in Intel processors. (I'd have to look, it was a topic of discussion on Hacker News yesterday...)