Faulty McAfee update may have disrupted chip production

For Intel, this meant initially they had to shut down, worldwide, most of their servers including email, and their VoIP phones. Some of their fab facilities suffered shut downs. All this was confirmed by our sources at three different facilities. Intel's corporate communications has not sent out a press release as of our publication time.

We have learned in our tours of chip fabs that once a wafer process is started it can take up to six weeks for a finished CPU to pop out. Any disruption of the process has become a bigger problem as the chip architecture gets smaller and smaller. Since all of Intel's corporate networks had some type of interruption that means at least some of their wafer production is in jeopardy. Plus, some of the their production equipment may need to be refurbished before going back online. We heard repeated rumors that Intel's Oregon and Costa Rica fabs were affected ? possibly causing a lot of wafers to be scrapped. The same matter could have happened in GlobalFoundries and TSMC, as manufacturing facilities by those two giants run on Windows XP as well.