Well, it's hardly a secret that we've been seeing a lot of simulator outages in the last 48 hours. This one - well, this set of them caught the eye of the sharp-eyed Carl Metropolitan.

Is it a fire-break against a goo attack? Is it a crash caused by some common factor that's tickling a bug in all these sims? Are they all in the same rack and there's something affecting the equipment there?

Heck, maybe someone's trying sky-writing with sim-crashers. What do you think?

After a bit of hurried discussion on the Second Life Developers mailing list, Linden Lab have rushed out an optional viewer update for people using some older hardware (most notably some AMD processors).

A recent patch introduced SSE/SSE2 instructions into a part of the viewer, which should speed up certain operations and calculations on processors that support it. Less fortunately, some global class instances in that module of the code are created before the CPU detection code could determine if the SSE class instructions were supported, causing an immediate crash for certain classes of hardware that didn't support them. Resident Angus Boyd was the first to report this issue.

This viewer fixes that issue, and allows the Second Life to start properly again on the affected class of hardware.

[UPDATE: Word is that this fix doesn't fix the issue. Wait for tomorrow's update instead.]