Official forums are offline as well.  First time anything of this nature has occurred (that I am aware of) since Alpha 2nd wave when I first installed the sim.  Hopefully will be resolved soon as this does indeed suck.

Front page of MS forums:

We are currently aware of an online services outage impacting player ability to use live weather, traffic, and other online functionality. This also affects players’ ability to download Sim Update 6. The team is investigating, and we hope to have a solution and return to normal service as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

MSFS Team

1 hour ago, FrankR409 said:

Yea, they have only had 99.95% uptime.  The sky is falling.

Exactly.  

1 hour ago, FrankR409 said:

Yea, they have only had 99.95% uptime.  The sky is falling.

Exactly.  

I had to smile  Online servers issues  - affecting live weather, traffic, and other online functionality  - the other online functionalities mentioned is the scenery  - not something you want to do without in VFR flight. I noticed with no online connection the default scenery is terrible  - left things for the time being and will wait and see

 

 

They have been looking into this for over 6 hours now...

https://twitter.com/MSFS_Support?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

Just growing pains and is actually a very good thing because it suggests demand is outpacing supply, and that is always a good thing for a developing title.

43 minutes ago, badgenes said:

Official forums are offline as well.  First time anything of this nature has occurred (that I am aware of) since Alpha 2nd wave when I first installed the sim.  Hopefully will be resolved soon as this does indeed suck.

The MSFS forums always get wonky on the day of a major update because of the extreme traffic load of people reading and posting. 

The current problem may be affecting other MS games - not just MSFS.

There is not “a” server involved in running MSFS online - there are multiple servers in multiple geographic locations. I have looked at all the TCP/IP connections the sim makes when running, and it is typically connected to between 5 and 9 discrete IP addresses - some resolve to Azure in the Seattle area, one is an Amazon AWS server near Portland, OR, several are Akamai Technologies in New York City etc. By enabling and disabling various in-game features, and watching the changes in network traffic,  I am quite confident the streaming scenery, live weather and multiplayer all come from completely different servers in different locations.

I suspect that the current problem is with whichever server is responsible for authenticating users and coordinating the overall network connections of the game.

 

6 minutes ago, JRBarrett said:

The MSFS forums always get wonky on the day of a major update because of the extreme traffic load of people reading and posting. 

The current problem may be affecting other MS games - not just MSFS.

There is not “a” server involved in running MSFS online - there are multiple servers in multiple geographic locations. I have looked at all the TCP/IP connections the sim makes when running, and it is typically connected to between 5 and 9 discrete IP addresses - some resolve to Azure in the Seattle area, one is an Amazon AWS server near Portland, OR, several are Akamai Technologies in New York City etc. By enabling and disabling various in-game features, and watching the changes in network traffic,  I am quite confident the streaming scenery, live weather and multiplayer all come from completely different servers in different locations.

I suspect that the current problem is with whichever server is responsible for authenticating users and coordinating the overall network connections of the game.

 

Thanks for the explanation.  I just wished they separated the "update" servers from the "content" servers so I could, at least, update the sim.  How about just using the built-in Windows update process? 

Oh goodie. I'm glad it's not just me. I was flipping out trying to get Live Weather to work, deleted everything in my community folder because I assumed it was a problem with the new update since I had the free weather mod installed. Then I realized my account is logged off... never had this happen before. Thank God for this forum or I'd probably be wasting more time on an unsolvable problem.

36 minutes ago, Noel said:

Just growing pains and is actually a very good thing because it suggests demand is outpacing supply, and that is always a good thing for a developing title.

Hoping that’s it and not another DDoS (which the Azure servers thwarted last week).

27 minutes ago, irocx said:

Thanks for the explanation.  I just wished they separated the "update" servers from the "content" servers so I could, at least, update the sim.  How about just using the built-in Windows update process? 

That’s why I think the current problem lies with the authentication server(s).

The servers that are used for used for game updates like SU6 are indeed completely different than the ones used for actually running the game. I watched the TCP/IP traffic earlier today while SU6 was downloading. The update was coming from an Azure IP address that geolocates to Illinois (perhaps a data center in or near Chicago). 

I have seen that particular IP network address range used before in previous sim updates. I have never seen it used in day-to-day sim operations. 

It does seem that the main issue right now is that MSFS cannot authenticate with the XBox gaming network, which prevents all online MSFS services from working, including the main sim update for SU6. 

2 hours ago, Captain Nuts said:

I can't imagine that there's any way to make that more messed up and disappointing.

Dont say that

I lost my app says its gone, cause I thought it was a Win 11 issue so rolled back to win 10 and lost MSFS, trying to reinstall 139 G

48 minutes ago, JRBarrett said:

Yes with a couple of caveats:  You could replace 'server' with HA VM clusters themselves no doubt in HA with multiple local clusters at each facility hosting MSFS services.  (HA = High Availability which here describes a set of VMs (virtual machines) that are observed by a 'witness' such that a failure of one when detected by said witness initiates a redirection of all connections to the HA partner for the VM.  These clusters are themselves groups of physical servers that host the virtual servers such that a physical failure is handled via HA as well.  These groups of physical servers are all backed by networked storage and are housed in one datacenter or another with multiple arbiters (load balancers) determining which cluster gets new connections based on present (and predicted) load patterns.  A cluster either provides singular services (scenery, weather, etc.) or multiple.  Given your experience in tracing connectivity it would appear a datacenter is responsible for one set of services such that all of the clusters allocated provide one of the resources MSFS uses.  Given this I don't wonder if you are correct in your possible point of failure.  There is as you posited the authentication layer to deal with and while no doubt redundant this would be a point of failure that would affect all services.  The systems hosting all of this are probably getting a break while the frontend services are the issue.  

Since we are stuck without the sim I thought I'd elaborate, likely needlessly but WTH 🙂

 

The MSFS forums always get wonky on the day of a major update because of the extreme traffic load of people reading and posting. 

The current problem may be affecting other MS games - not just MSFS.

There is not “a” server involved in running MSFS online - there are multiple servers in multiple geographic locations. I have looked at all the TCP/IP connections the sim makes when running, and it is typically connected to between 5 and 9 discrete IP addresses - some resolve to Azure in the Seattle area, one is an Amazon AWS server near Portland, OR, several are Akamai Technologies in New York City etc. By enabling and disabling various in-game features, and watching the changes in network traffic,  I am quite confident the streaming scenery, live weather and multiplayer all come from completely different servers in different locations.

I suspect that the current problem is with whichever server is responsible for authenticating users and coordinating the overall network connections of the game.

 

 

Official forums are back online.