The incident highlights the unexpected performance impacts of the Meltdown and Spectre patches on CPU utilization, particularly in kernel space. A large-scale analysis by Datadog found a noticeable increase in `system.cpu.system` across millions of cores, with the impact being more pronounced in hosts that spend more time in kernel space. The study also revealed that compute-intensive workloads were most affected, while memory-optimized instances showed less significant increases. The widespread issue underscores the systemic effects of security patches and raises concerns about potential future performance impacts.