Today was supposed to be a day of celebration for Flight Sim fans – the arrival of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on Xbox and PC (including as part of Xbox Game Pass). Unfortunately though, it’s suffered a very turbulent start so far.

When the game went live a couple of hours ago, players found that they were suffering from an extremely long initial load time that never actually finished in many instances. Here at Pure Xbox, we’re still unable to fly a plane over two hours since we first started trying! Unfortunately, it appears that Flight Sim 2024 is just too in demand right now.

Obviously, a big problem here is that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 relies on its online servers to function. Yes, it’s great that it’s just an 11GB download on Xbox Series X, but that means we’re probably streaming most of its content rather than installing it natively – and it also means that unlike the 2020 version, it can’t be played offline at all.

Here’s what developer Asobo Studio had to say in a statement about the servers earlier today:

“We are aware of user reports of long initial loading times into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. With so many users initializing the sim concurrently, we have a large number of server requests. 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.”

It’s not just the long loading times that are the problem though. We’ve seen weird error messages (as highlighted in the image above) and been forced back to the dashboard a number of times, so it’s a messy situation all over. We’re assuming most of these glitches are linked to the server issues – at least, we’re hoping that’s the case!

These problems will most likely work themselves out in the coming days, but when you consider that some people are paying up to $200 to play this game, it’s certainly not an ideal start. Let’s hope the situation resolves itself ASAP.

Have you been struggling with Flight Sim 2024? Let us know down in the comments section below.