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Update: The login queue issue looks like it's been fixed, so you should be able to launch the game and fly. "The waiting queue to login to MSFS 2024 has been resolved. We are aware of additional technical issues that the team is working to address. We will have another update later today," Microsoft announced on Discord. More info here.
Update: The developers have streamed a brief explanation (embedded above) of the launch issues, which involve a database cache that's been "completely overwhelmed" by the launch, causing "extremely long initial loading," or a failure to load entirely, and missing content. "We know everybody, a lot of people, are frustrated," said Flight Sim head Jorg Neumann. "We're really sorry, we want to apologize ... The team is on it, and we will keep going." Updates will be posted to the game's official social channels.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is out today, and it's not going well. Installation issues are being widely reported, and while Microsoft has some advice, it is unfortunately just this: Keep waiting until something starts happening.
The troubles are most visible (as usual) on Steam, where Flight Sim 2024 is currently sagging under a "mostly negative" rating thanks primarily to install issues. Some users can't get it installed 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 restart or crash were forced to start the process all over again, which resulted in them being stuck back in a wait for server queues.
"I downloaded the game and got to fly a plane," one Steam user reported. "Game said that I need to restart to enable my settings. I did and now the game is downloading [a] second time."
We've experienced similar issues ourselves: Rather than soaring into the wild blue yonder, PC Gamer's Chris Livingston has spent more than an hour staring at this:
Microsoft acknowledged the problem with "long initial loading times" in a post on X. "With so many users initializing the sim concurrently, we have a large number of server requests," the Flight Simulator support account wrote. "We are working to help resolve the issues as soon as possible.
"For users whose initial load is past 90% and no longer progressing, we recommend a reboot. Otherwise we advise waiting to allow the loading to proceed as normal."
That's not the most helpful advice ever, especially given Steam's standard two-hour time limit on refund requests, which several people say they've already surpassed just waiting for the installation to finish. Microsoft acknowledged in a separate post that the problem with 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 found there—but for now, that's apparently as good as it gets: Just hang in there, baby! We'll keep you posted, and in the meantime you can keep track of how things are going yourself on the Xbox Status support page.
