Microsoft only planned for 200,000 users for Flight Simulator launch, admits drastic underestimate led to database being overwhelmed

Microsoft revealed in a YouTube video Wednesday that it vastly underestimated how many players would jump into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 at launch. Despite Microsoft load testing the game's servers with 200,000 simulated users, the game suffered — and is still suffering — from overwhelmed backend services, which have been the main cause for game loading issues and crashes.

According to Microsoft engineers, the game's infrastructure was stress-tested with 200,000 simulated users to ensure the game would run smoothly at launch. However, despite this preparation, the mission service database cache became (and remains) saturated, causing problems for users who are trying to do missions in the game.

To combat this issue, Microsoft has implemented a throttling mechanism to limit the number of players entering the game at once. But even with throttling, the service has already crashed at least once, and restarting the service apparently takes a long time — causing even longer delays.

Developer Launch Day Update | Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 - YouTube

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This service crash results in extremely long loading times for gamers. Microsoft says that if the game stops loading at 97% and an error message pops up, users need to restart the game and try again. (A lack of default planes appearing in user's libraries is another issue caused by Microsoft's service problems.)

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched yesterday at 8 am PST, to a whole host of problems that prevented users from being able to play or even install the game. And since Microsoft didn't offer pre-launch access, reviewers were also rushing to create content as soon as possible (resulting in, perhaps, a heavily-covered launch day fiasco).

Our editors at Tom's Hardware attempted to install the game yesterday — two of our editors managed to hit around 70% before the installation failed, and one editor managed to install the game but could only access the main menu. So, unfortunately, we'll have to postpone our review of MSFS 2024 until Microsoft's game services are actually working.

Microsoft did not give a timeframe for when it expects these issues to be resolved. It's obvious, though, that Microsoft did not expect over 200,000 people to play the game at once. We wouldn't be surprised if player counts are more than twice that, based on how extensive the backend issues still appear to be.