Although highly anticipated, the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was met with unexpected heavy turbulence, to say the least. While many simulation enthusiasts were struggling to get their first flight started, the official MSFS channel on YouTube shared an update on these launch issues.
Sebastian Wloch, the CEO of Asobo Studio; and the lead of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, both explained the cause of these problems that occurred with the public release of the new simulator. Also, the team’s ongoing efforts to address them were discussed.
Server Overload and Loading Screen Issues
Sebastian Wloch addressed one of the most prominent issues, loading screens stuck at 97%, which were caused by excessive server demand. Asobo’s pre-launch tests simulated server capacity for only 200,000 simultaneous users, but the actual player traffic has far exceeded this estimate. This is overloading the servers responsible for not only streaming the simulator’s upgraded scenery content but also the included airplanes themselves.
To fix these Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 issues, Asobo and Microsoft implemented systems like player queuing and internal server restarts while working on long-term fixes. Wloch apologized to all people of the hobby and expressed the team’s commitment to resolving these problems as fast as possible.
Additional Launch Day Challenges
Two official articles were released alongside the developer update mentioning other launch day hurdles:
Server Overload Impacting New Features
The career mode, missions, and other new features introduced in MSFS 2024 stress these service servers additionally as almost all user data is stored in a database in the cloud. This leads to long loading times and missing content such as aircraft from your hangar.
Backwards Compatibility
Over 7,790 add-ons from MSFS 2020’s marketplace have been converted, but some caused compatibility issues, even blocking the simulator from launching. Nearly 4,000 add-ons have already been validated to be working with MSFS 2024, with the team continuing this process to ensure compatibility without getting broken content in their simulation experience.
Despite many flight simmers not being able to fly their first patterns in the new simulator on day one, Microsoft remains confident in the success of MSFS 2024. Ongoing issues are still being acknowledged through posts on the official MSFS Discord server. All users are encouraged to stay tuned for updates featuring these announced fixes.
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