I had same situation today. And tried clear community folder. Without any mods I can play game so I delated some mods and scenery witch I don’t use very often and everything works ok now. Must be some old mods…
After a few hours of frustrating diagnostics/fixes, I figured mine out and the update worked. Don’t know if it is your issue. If you use a third party firewall, maybe this will help.
Today i tried to play and now i can play, now everything is ok lol
Looks like the original suggestion didn’t work. I’m going to escalate this up.
Just had this issue - left it to do its thing and eventually loaded up OK! I guess it was doing something in the background when the load bar seemed to indicate it had finished … so might be worth leaving it for a while? Cheers!
Got this issue yesterday for the first time, after the hotfix. I just let it sit there with the full blue bar for 5-10 minutes, and the menu eventually loaded.
I’ve also noticed that the “Checking for Updates” screen is taking much longer to complete now, greatly increasing the already long loading time…
Happened to me just now. It was working fine yesterday after my last usage. Now, its stuck on this loading screen for the past 4 hours. LOL
I’m on steam and I doesn’t want to verify the file integrity as it will download back the whole 100GiB of files 
server issues check the other post
cool thanks Chris
This is what I’m getting too, was fine when I loaded up some hours ago but this just started, same screen and no loading bar.
yeah they said server issue on steam side or something. Guess we have to wait for it to go back up 
Yeah, another one, we should never be locked out of the sim because of that, a proper developer would code it to just notify the user and it would still load into the sim, you would just not get streaming higher quality assets and other online functions which would be understandable, this is just another poor showing once again from Asobo.
Same, do you mean the screen with the UK scene and it just hangs there? Not like it’s frozen either just doesn’t do anything. I’ve actually deleted all the data in the appdata/local and uninstalled the game/reinstalled. It just sits there. Tried running as admin, tried turning on a VPN and the other 8 things they say to try.
I’m Hanging at the UK scene. This is definately an issue outside of our computers.
I see that there are 37 posts in this thread but I can’t be bothered to read any. Is anyone having this issue or is it just me? ← sarcasm
Yeah, its just froze there and doesn’t do anything until I press ALT+F4 to close the sims. Seems like MSFS is aware about this issue too. Seems like steam issue. They posted it in their official discord server.
yeah not just you but 37 user here and more at MSFS official discord channel 
they posted this link:
https://downdetector.com/status/steam/
I followed some work around by somebody in Steam forum. Start the sim in an offline mode, it will make you logout from XBOX live. Then close the sim ALT+F4 and start back in online mode. Login back into XBOX live and the sim scanning for an update and basically download the whole game?? maybe this is because i was verifying the game integrity files before was inform that the steam server was having issue? 
As per my thread, MSFS is up and running again on Steam. For gawd’s sake don’t delete your files, like some poor bloke did.