Flight Simulator 2024: the plane was fine, the runway was missing
Flight Simulator 2024 launch locked buyers in a multi-hour login queue
The market's verdict: +0.7% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched on November 19, 2024 and immediately put much of its paying audience on the tarmac, with loading screens that stretched for hours and a login queue explaining that too many users were trying to connect at the same time, to a product whose entire world is streamed from Microsoft's cloud. Launch-day capacity planning for one of the year's biggest first party releases, defeated by the concept of a launch day. Access improved over the following days, by which point everyone had fully enjoyed the free hangar simulator.
This one is well documented.
Were you affected? Unbreak it
Queue cleared and patches landed over following days
Microsoft has acknowledged this issue; a fix ships in an out-of-band or next cumulative update. Check Windows Release Health before manual workarounds.
Links
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Impact
- Windows Central (publication)
↳ caused by Flight Simulator 2024 launch
Timeline
- Nov 19, 2024 Fixed Microsoft shipped a fix.