From what I recall, patches started showing up in the Linux Kernel, causing lots of buzz and speculation among the security community. People noticed that one

From what I recall, patches started showing up in the Linux Kernel, causing lots of buzz and speculation among the security community. People noticed that one patch was only being applied to Intel processors, leading some tech blogs to speculate that only Intel processors were affected by the bug, and that triggered a PR response from Intel. Then someone reverse-engineered an exploit and posted about it on Twitter, and the cat was out of the bag at that point, so they moved up the disclosure timeline.