Intel slapped with class action lawsuit over crashing CPU fiasco

Intel’s issues with 13th- and 14th-gen CPU crashes are well-documented at this point. To make a long story short: High-end chips have been crashing and failing with apparently irreversible damage, and Intel blames overzealous performance settings in the motherboard BIOS.

One New Yorker isn’t satisfied with Intel’s extended RMA offerings, though, and he’s suing the company in a class action.

Ars Technica reports on the suit brought by one Mark Vanvalkenburgh, which alleges that Intel knew about the processors’ issues in late 2022 or early 2023 and failed to disclose them to buyers, even as return rates climbed and both end users and tech media (including PCWorld) began to widely discuss the issue. Vanvalkenburgh and his lawyers allege that Intel’s withholding of internal data on failures and return rates was misleading and caused him and many others to buy CPUs they would have otherwise avoided.

Depending on what’s presented in discovery, Vanvalkenburgh’s lawyers estimate that hundreds of thousands — or possibly millions — of people could be part of the class action. Though Intel maintains that not every 13th- and 14th-gen desktop processor is vulnerable to these failures, that’s yet to be demonstrated empirically.

This scenario is already one of the biggest CPU blunders in recent memory, but information resulting from this suit has the potential to make it spiral into a full-on disaster.

And Intel can’t afford a disaster right now. The company has been reeling from multiple setbacks, including disappointing performance from its latest desktop and laptop chips, an inability to capitalize on the AI boom as Nvidia eats everyone’s lunch, and an ascendant AMD riding high on its X3D chips in the enthusiast market. And that’s without mentioning a new push from Qualcomm and other Arm-based chip manufacturers now reaching into the Windows space. The company’s stock is trading at less than half of what it was at the beginning of 2024, and it will soon be removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average to be replaced by Nvidia, which is now the most valuable corporation on the planet.

Intel tried to assuage owners of affected CPUs by extending the one-year warranty support window to a full three years, which covers everyone who’s purchased a chip in these series so far. But as Ars notes, it’s little comfort to those who bought a high-end chip to “future-proof” a powerful desktop, possibly to keep it going far beyond that.