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Exactly why. Even if the performance impact is 3%, that means the world has lost maybe 2% of its CPU power overnight. That's an utterly massive amount of hardware, many billions of dollars, maybe a trillian.

It's not just the cost of the processors, but everything that contains them. Truly 'fixing' all the affected products would bankrupt a county but we should get a refund for the CPU's at the least

And I add they will have legal issues in multiple countries, each with their own rules.

Yes. They’re facing potentially ruinous class actions from individuals, and the legal fury of uncounted corporations which are going to suffer. It’s hard to imagine Intel dying, but if the impact on performance is so enormous, it could happen. So yes, they are in ass-covering-survival-mode. Having said that, I wouldn’t expect Intel to go down in legal flames, but the endless PR dripping is going to have to become a flood for a long time to recover.