Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 hasn't been having the best launch day experience. The online servers decided to buckle under the sheer load of Xbox, PC, and Game Pass players trying to log in and stay down for many hours across all platforms. Finally, though, it seems the development team has managed to keep the back end steady.
The studio has released a statement explaining what exactly went wrong with the servers on launch day:
We have worked hard with our partners, including Asobo and others, to bring you an amazing sim experience. The excitement for the sim today has been overwhelming, but we encountered an issue with one of our services handling the new systems in the game like career mode and various missions. The server responsible for handling data requests got overloaded, causing delays and errors.
In a launch day developer video update from the studio, Asobo CEO and Co-founder Sebastian Wloch added more context to the issue.
"The issue this causes is pretty much that when the service fails, it keeps retrying, which leads to extremely long initial loading times that are not supposed to be that long," he explains. "After a while, if the missing data is critical, the loading will fail at 97%, and you'll get a message prompting a restart. If the missing content is not blocking, you might enter the sim but experience some missing planes or other content. This is all due to the same problem with the server and the cache."
According to the developer, now that the initial crunch of people has eased and server issues have been corrected, players should now be able to log in as expected. "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience," adds the studio.
The launch day woes have affected the Steam user reviews heavily, too, which currently stands at a 17% Overwhelmingly Negative score with almost 3000 reviews. The all-time peak of concurrent players hit 24,863 on launch day before dropping off. We may see this number rise as the weekend approaches if the servers decide to stay happy.