Seems to be a recent issue for me. Have seen others report something similar.

The MSFS startup sequence seems to stall at the screen before 'Checking for Updates' (city, with red bring spanning river/inlet). It just sits beach balling perpetually. An internet speed test suggests this is not a connectivity issue. It doesn't have often – perhaps 1 in 6/7 starts – but when it does happen I cannot get MSFS to load without a protracted struggle. 

Curiously, I've only experienced this when North America is asleep. 😑

 

What seems to work: start in Safe Mode, quit, then restart in Normal Mode. 

I don't know if you're using Google Maps or not but I had a similar situation several weeks ago.  It would load about 3/4 of the way and just stall.

After a tip from a poster, I found that I had not loaded Google Maps before I open the sim.  When I opened it first, everything loaded okay.  My guess is that It was looking for data from the Google site and since I hadn't opened it, it stalled.

I had this happen again yesterday.  I was going to compare some Google scenery to Bing, so I didn't open the Google,  It stalled on me.  I don't know if this is a bug with Google or just something with my setup, but I thought you might benefit from my experience.  Everything works fine as long as I open Google Maps first.

Roy

Thanks for the insight, but nope, I use the standard Bing maps. I’ve had issues with my apparent assigned server in the past, so chalk it up as that. 🤷‍♂️