Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

The debut of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 yesterday was met with severe turbulence as servers struggled to keep up with user demand.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was hotly anticipated. New life was breathed into the old franchise in 2020, and fans have anxiously awaited the sequel, hoping it would iron out some of the rough edges and add some new modes and detail.

However, the launch, at 0800 Pacific (1600 UTC) on November 19, did not go well for a large number of users. Many reported lengthy loading times and hours spent listening to GPU fans. Users whose initial load had gotten past 90 percent but then stalled were advised by the Microsoft Flight Simulator support account to reboot and try again.

The timing of the incident is unfortunate. While customers who had spent three-figure sums on the title struggled with connection issues, Microsoft's Ignite event was getting under way. In addition to the inevitable focus on AI, Microsoft is promoting its cloud service, Azure. Having its name linked to a failure of server scaling and planning is, therefore, less than ideal.

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The developers posted a video to explain the situation and apologize for the inconvenience. Sebastian Wloch, CEO and co-founder of the title's developer, Asobo, insisted that everything worked under a simulated load of 200,000 users, but a database cache crumpled under demand on launch day. Retries after failures extended load times and users who did get in were missing aircraft due to incomplete installations.

Launch days can be bumpy for some titles, and services overwhelming servers is not isolated to the gaming industry, as anyone who has attempted to purchase tickets for certain events can attest. However, the surge could have been easily predicted, and the load testing was clearly inadequate. In addition, being unable to scale to handle the load is inexcusable. Particularly when the game's publisher also operates the second-largest cloud provider.

We asked Microsoft if it planned to chuck another hamster or two into Azure's wheel to help things along. The company has yet to respond. ®