Microsoft Flight Simulator crashes on takeoff due to massive server problems. Microsoft's advice? Just wait until something happens.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is not working well. Microsoft's advice is to wait until something happens before you start experiencing installation issues.

As usual, the biggest problems are on Steam where Flight Sim 2024 has a "mostly-negative" rating due to installation issues. Some users are unable to install the game at all. Others say that it took them hours to finish and they were left with missing menus or other content. Some users say they downloaded and ran the game, but were forced to restart the process after a crash or restart. This left them stuck in server queues.

One Steam user said, "I downloaded the program and was able to fly a plane." "Game said I needed to restart to enable settings. "I did it and now the game [is] downloading [a]second time."

We've had similar problems ourselves. PC Gamer's Chris Livingston spent more than an hr staring at the screen.

Microsoft acknowledged that "long initial load times" were a problem in a blog post on X. Flight Simulator Support wrote: "With so many users initiating the sim simultaneously, we have a high number of server requests." "We are working hard to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.

"We recommend a restart for users whose initial loading is beyond 90% and not progressing any further." We recommend waiting for the loading to continue as normal.

This is not the best advice, especially since Steam's two-hour refund limit has been exceeded by several people who were waiting for the installation process to finish. Microsoft acknowledged in another post that the missing planes problem is also "related to server issues we are working to resolve."

Just hold on, baby! In the meantime, you can check out the Xbox Status page to see how things are progressing.