Laminar Research has said that its online services for X-Plane are slowly coming back online after being temporarily taken down as a precaution. The developer announced the shutdown and the later recovery in posts on social media.
According to the first post, the trigger was news of a critical security patch for PHP, a widely used web technology on which some of the systems behind the X-Plane online services rely. Laminar Research said it had no indication that its systems were under threat, but preferred to be safe. It took some services offline while it ran security checks and applied updates, and expected everything to be back within a few hours.
The team described the effects for each product. Desktop users of X-Plane 12 who had flown recently were expected to keep flying as normal. If the simulator needed to revalidate a licence, it might start in demo mode until services returned. New installations and scenery changes through the installer were unavailable. On X-Plane Mobile, content already downloaded kept working, but extra scenery could not be downloaded. Purchases and account access in the X-Plane Store and Accounts were also unavailable. Users did not need to reinstall, re-enter licence keys or change settings.
The latest update, posted roughly seven hours after the first according to the feed timestamps, reads: “Our services should be slowly coming back online! Thanks for your cooperation and patience.” The wording suggests a gradual recovery rather than an instant one.
The official account also replied to several users in the comments. When a user reported that downloading real-time weather data had stopped working, X-Plane answered simply: “Weather is down.” Another user said their Air Manager pop-out for a 530 was not working and that a licence key appeared inactive on the A36. X-Plane replied that it “has nothing to do with addon aircraft” and advised contacting the respective developers, adding that some of those problems were “likely linked to the on-going SASL outage too.” Other commenters reported being locked into demo mode during the outage.
Laminar Research has not published further details of the security checks or the exact time services were fully restored. FSNews will report if the developer shares more information.
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