Class Action Lawsuit Against Apple Over Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities Dismissed

Back in January 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a wide range of processors from Intel and ARM, including those used in Apple's Macs and iOS devices.

Meltdown and Spectre were hardware-based vulnerabilities designed to take advantage of the speculative execution mechanism of a CPU, allowing hackers to gain access to sensitive information.


Apple quickly mitigated Spectre and Meltdown with software patches, but a class action complaint was filed against Apple alleging that Apple knew about the design defects in June 2017 and did not more promptly inform the public.

The complaint also suggested that Apple would not be able to adequately patch Meltdown and Spectre without slowing the performance of its processors by between five and 30 percent, a claim that turned out to be untrue.

As pointed out by AppleInsider, the class action lawsuit against Apple was today dismissed for "lack of standing and failure to state a claim."

According to the ruling, the plaintiffs in the case were not able to allege injury because none of their devices were accessed via Spectre or Meltdown and no degradation in performance was personally experienced by the plaintiffs.

Furthermore, the court said that even if some devices were affected by Meltdown and Spectre as evidenced in some of the benchmarks submitted by the plaintiffs, it does not suggest that all users experienced slower performance, nor were the plaintiffs able to prove that their iOS devices diminished in value.

Given these reasons, Apple's motion to dismiss was granted, though the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are able to provide an amended complaint by January 24, 2019.