Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 crashes on launch thanks to massive server issues, developers say they’re working on it: ‘The team is on it and we’ll continue’

On November 20, 2024By Littum

Developer Launch Day Update | Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – YouTube

Update: The developers have streamed a brief explanation (embedded above) of the launch issues, which involve a database cache that has been “completely overwhelmed” by the launch, causing “extremely long initial load” or a failure to load completely and missing content. “We know that everybody, a lot of people, is frustrated,” said Flight Sim boss Jorg Neumann. “We’re really sorry, we want to apologize … The team is on it and we want to continue.” Updates will be sent to the game official social channels.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is out today and it’s not doing well. Installation problems are widely reported, and while Microsoft does have some advice, unfortunately it’s just this: keep waiting until something starts to happen.

The problems are most visible (as usual) on Steamwith Flight Sim 2024 currently falling under a “mostly negative” rating thanks primarily to installation issues. Some users can’t get it to install at all, while others say the process took hours to complete and left them with missing menus or content. Others say they were able to download and run the game, but after a reboot or crash, they were forced to start the process all over again, resulting in them being put back in server queues.

“I downloaded the game and got to fly a plane,” reported one Steam user. “The game told me to restart to enable my settings. I did and now the game is downloading (a) second time.”

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Negative Steam Reviews

(Image credit: Steam)

We’ve experienced similar issues ourselves: Instead of floating off into the wild blue out there, PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston spent over an hour staring at this:

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Xbox Status Support Page Error Message

(Image credit: Xbox Support)

Microsoft acknowledged the issue of “long initial load times” in a post on X. “With so many users initializing the sim simultaneously, we have a high number of server requests,” wrote the Flight Simulator support account. “We are working to help resolve the issues as quickly as possible.

“For users whose initial load is over 90% and no longer progressing, we recommend a restart. Otherwise, we recommend waiting to continue loading as normal.”

(Image credit: MSFS Support (Twitter))

That’s not the most helpful advice ever, especially considering Steam’s standard two-hour time limit for refund requests, which several people say they’ve already exceeded while just waiting for the install to finish. Microsoft acknowledged in a separate post that the issue of missing planes is also “related to the server issues we are currently working to resolve.”

Hopefully Microsoft will have a proper fix rolled out soon – it owns the Azure cloud computing platform, so maybe there’s some help to be had there – but for now, it seems this is as good as it gets: Just keep going baby! We will keep you informed, and in the meantime you can keep track of how things are going Xbox Status support page.