The CrowStrike Windows outage will go down in history as one of the biggest ever seen, as millions of PCs tied to industries like travel, healthcare, and government services experienced the dreaded Blue Screen of Death or BSOD last week.

Still fresh in everyone's minds, Jak and Kosta spend a big chunk of this week's episode of The TT Show talking about the CrowdStrike Windows outage, what caused it, and how the simple fix of manually booting into Windows Recovery turned out to be a massive undertaking when you're looking at millions of computers and a finite number of tech support specialists.

In this week's massive episode, it's not all CrowdStrike. Jak and Kosta also discuss Intel's ongoing CPU troubles and the controversy surrounding the flagship Core i9 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors. Intel has released an official statement, but is it enough?

PlayStation's live service game won't have a battle pass, developer Firewalk Studios has confirmed.

Sony has a unique game plan with its live service ambitions: Instead of going free-to-play, the PlayStation-maker wants to merge the worlds of premium and GaaS in one package. The company's next live game, Concord, will be sold at a premium $40 and will not rely on a battle pass to secure post-release monetization.

"You own Concord, Concord doesn't own you," said gameplay animation director Mark DeRidder. SIE and Firewalk are taking a similar approach as Helldivers II, which was also sold for $40 and includes a lot of free updates and content. Concord will likewise get a host of free updates that include new maps and characters. But unlike Helldivers II, Concord won't rely on the battle pass structure.

Rest easy: GTA 6 won't be delayed because of the recent game actors' strike, a spokesperson has confirmed to Kotaku.

Last night, the SAG-AFTRA union advised all game actors to go on strike due to concerns with AI. Unionized performers across all disciplines--motion capture, stunt people, and voice-over artists--are now on strike until proper resolutions can be made with billion-dollar publishers like Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Take-Two Interactive. This will have an immediate effect on in-production games and could lead to heavy delays at a time when the industry is already struggling.

Luckily, Grand Theft Auto 6 is not among the impacted projects. That's despite Take-Two, the parent company of GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games, being involved in the ongoing negotiations. "I can confirm GTA VI is exempt," Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson representing the game producers, told Kotaku.

TEAMGROUP has just launched its new T-FORCE GC PRO Gen5 SSD, powered by the InnoGrit "Tacoma" IG5666 controller with slower speeds than the T-FORCE GE PRO that the company launched back in January 2024.

The new TEAMGROUP T-FORCE GC PRO Gen5 SSD comes in both 2TB and 4TB capacities, with maximum sequential reads of up to 12.5GB/sec (12,500MB/sec) and sequential writes of up to 11GB/sec (11,000MB/sec). The new GC PRO Gen5 SSD is aimed at the lower price points, with the 2TB Gen5 SSD featuring 1200 TBW (terabytes written) and the 4TB Gen5 SSD with 2400 TBW.

TEAMGROUP doesn't have the fastest Gen5 SSD on the market, Sabrent takes the position there, but it's yet another Gen5 SSD on the market. The more, the better... slowly giving us more options, different price points, and a fleet of super-fast Gen5-ready SSDs for AMD Ryzen 9000 series and Intel Core Ultra 200 series CPU owners of the new future.

ASRock has just unveiled its latest passively-cooled graphics cards, with the new ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Passive 24GB and RX 7900 XT Passive 20GB graphics cards.

The new ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT Passive series graphics cards have been designed for multi-card parallel computing for better performance. ASRock uses a vapor chamber heatsink, efficient aluminum cooling devices, and V-shaped cutting.

Interstingly, ASRock has used a single horizontal 12V-2x6 power connector, so that you can install multiple ASRock Radeon RX 7900 Passive series graphics cards without as many cables running to (multiple) graphics cards.

SK hynix announced that its board has approved its Yongin Semiconductor Cluster investment plan, which will be home to the "world's largest mega fab complex". Check it out:

The South Korean memory giant has approved 9.4 trillion won in building the first fab and business facilities at its new Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, with SK hynix designs to start construction of its first fab to be built in the Yongin cluster in March 2025, and have it complete by May 2027.

SK hynix says it will make every effort to build the fab to lay the foundation for the company's future growth and respond to the rapidly increasing demand for AI memory semiconductors. The new Yongin Semiconductor Cluster will be built on a huge 4.15 million square meter site in Wonsam-myeon, Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, and is currently under site preparation and infrastructure construction.

Earlier this year Reddit announced it was making changes to its API that prohibited any scraping of its data without payment. The change resulted in an uproar on the social media platform and then total darkness as subreddits were abandoned to stand in solidarity with third-party app designers who could no longer access Reddit's data unless they paid for it.

Reddit took the same stance against third-party apps with search engines and any other company that was looking to acquire its wealth of data to improve proprietary products. Reports then surfaced about a $60 million annual deal being struck with Google for direct access to Reddit data, along with a similar deal being struck with OpenAI for Reddit posts to appear in responses by the company's chatbots such as ChatGPT.

But now the boot has finally come down as a new report from The Verge reveals Reddit has rolled out an update that prohibits all web crawling, or data gathering, on its website. The change has banned search engines such as Microsoft's Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others from crawling Reddit, meaning Reddit posts will no longer appear as search results within the now banned search engines.

On July 11, SpaceX encountered a critical failure problem on one of its Falcon 9 rockets. The problem resulted in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) protocol to be initiated, or boom.

SpaceX has taken to its website and X account to share an update on the review process following the failure of a Falcon 9 rocket. Notably, SpaceX's Falcon 9 is the company's workhorse rocket, having already launched 24 times this year and more than 350 times since its debut in 2010. During that time it has only experienced one catastrophic in-flight failure.

However, on July 11, a critical failure occurred during the first burn of Falcon 9's second-stage engine. SpaceX explains a liquid oxygen leak developed within the simulation around the upper stage engine, with engineers later discovering the cause of the leak was a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor that's attached to the vehicle's oxygen system. The sense line cracked due to "high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line."

NASA has taken to its website to detail newly snapped images of an exoplanet called Epsilon Indi Ab, which the space agency says is one of coldest exoplanets it has observed to date.

An international team of astronomers pointed Webb's extremely powerful infrared instruments at the exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab, which is approximately 12 light-years away from Earth and within the constellation of Indus. The planet orbits the K-type star known as Epsilon Indi A, which is approximately the same age as our Sun, only slightly cooler. The team used Webb's MIRI instrument, which stands for Mid-Infrared Instrument, to directly image the exoplanet and reveal its interesting properties.

The space agency explains Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets to be directly detected, measuring an extremely freezing temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius. Notably, Epsilon Indi Ab is the closest planet to Earth that is more massive than Jupiter, and is the twelfth closest exoplanet to Earth known to date.

The average household in the United States enjoys a reasonably fast internet speed of 245 Mbps, which translates to 30 megabytes per second. This kind of internet speed makes light work of new games that weigh 100GB, but what about the internet speeds in space? Or specifically the ISS? How long would it take for astronauts aboard the ISS to download Call of Duty: Modern Warfare?

NASA has recently put its network to the test under the HDTN project, which has successfully streamed 4K UHD video between NASA's PC-12 aircraft, optical ground stations, a satellite, and finally, the International Space Station (ISS). During the test, NASA recorded speeds of more than 900 Mbps or 112.5 megabytes per second.

So, what happened? NASA began testing its network in May by firing lasers from a small single-engine aircraft while it flew over Lake Erie. The target was a ground station in Cleveland, Ohio, which then relayed the 4K video to NASA's White Sands Test Facility. From there, the 4K video was blasted to NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) satellite, which was then sent to the ISS.

AMD's new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9 9950X processor has been overclocked to nearly 6.0GHz and benchmarked, showing some mighty fine performance that beats the Core i9-14900KS processor.

The new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor is based on the new Zen 5 architecture featuring 16 cores and 32 threads, with a max CPU boost of up to 5.7GHz and a 170W TDP. Installed and ready to overclock, the Ryzen 9 9950X was pushed up to 5963MHz (5.9GHz).

AMD's new Ryzen 9 9950X processor was installed into an ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E motherboard with DDR5-6000 memory, but we don't know what cooling the 9950X at the time. AMD's own XOC team overclocked the Ryzen 9 9950X processor with LN2 cooling, pushing it to 6.6GHz recently.