Actually… if you look at network topology and do some digging into business news, it doesn’t even make sense that Warp would help.
Deutsche Telekom has a “strong peering relationship” with Microsoft. Their subsidiary for business/enterprise customers, T-Systems, loves selling Azure cloud services.
For reference, traceroute showing the “direct connection” between Deutsche Telekom and MS:
On the other hand, Cloudflare and Telekom seem to be very involved in the fight over EU Network Usage Fees. On opposing sides, of course. Cloudflare and Meta appear to be among the main players on the side of big tech, Deutsche Telekom is a major player on the side of European ISPs. Apparently (and this is 2nd hand information, grain of salt, please) Deutsche Telekom actively refuses peerings with Cloudflare and Meta.
So, yeah, if Cloudflare Warp does help with MSFS, it’s most likely just coincidental.
Switching between Warp and Impulse (I made a Star Trek joke there! I feel like a regular Mike Stoklasa!) or rebooting your router might help you by letting your traffic go to a different “Availability Zone” of Azure, ie. to a different datacenter of the MSFS backend (CDN, databases, XBGS, etc.), evading the one that’s currently keeping you from playing.
After this journey of discovery, I’m not closer to flying, also not closer to knowing what the issue is.
I suspect that one day (hopefully sooner rather than later), some Azure admin (if they still have them in this mad, mad DevOps world) will notice the typo in the configuration of the MSFS backend deployment… “Huh. Why is the number of nodes for service X in zone Y limited to some small number? Shouldn’t that be some bigger number? Let me fix that.”
All our issues will disappear from one moment to the other, we will never know what happened, and everybody else will look at us in pity, assuming we were all just too stupid to follow their voodoo* magic (“delete file X, clear cache Y, defrag your SSD, and reboot while clicking your heels three times”).
That’s just more voodoo. While there have historically been some routers with technical issues that could be resolved by rebooting, I don’t feel the need to reboot my FritzBox unless there’s an issue on the “last mile”, ie. between my router and the ISP hardware down the road. If a speed test tells me that my throughput is fine, it’s really hard to imagine how my router could be responsible for intermittent network or server issues somewhere else.
PS: I apologize to everyone whose religious feelings I might have hurt using the word “voodoo”. I’m so old, I just don’t know better.