(Update: Solved. I think.
I think I solved the problem, and it’s assuredly a really weird one.
There was an antivirus software called Malwarebytes that was installed on my machine. (Bloatware from the OEM, I think. Who knows.) I was looking through the list of processes and saw it. So I just uninstalled that thing.
So far I’ve had two successful flights in excess of 2 hours in length. Everything else has remained the same: I left all MSFS addons on, etc. There is a huge question of why Malwarebytes behaves this way, but as soon as it was removed things worked correctly and have been so far. My only guess is that it looks at the amount of data and assumes “malware.”
So to any of the other people having this incredibly frustrating problem, I would suggest killing all antivirus type software. If the problem resolves, add them back in one by one if you must.)
ISSUE DESCRIPTION
MSFS 2024 connectivity dies during every flight. This has been described before, and several people have commented in a different thread that they are having the same problems.
The flight starts off normally. At some point while flying, Asobo’s servers start dropping the network connection, eventually making the simulator unusable. It will bounce back to “Trying to connect to your network…”, warn about the connection being “unstable,” and even complained about low bandwidth at one point. Usually, it will eventually go back to a pause screen and let me start, only to have it happen again. If I can even do a final approach, I’m landing on nonexistent or distorted scenery.
I was having problems over wireless and it was suggested that this was an issue with wireless connectivity even though nothing else is affected, and this is a problem that just recently started happening this month. I upgraded the wireless and upgraded my pipe to 3Gbps, which I was going to do anyway, and it still doesn’t work.
Finally, I dragged an Ethernet cable across the house. As expected, network performance was better. Yet MSFS still does the same exact thing.
In all cases, once this bug occurs, I can monitor the network connection and while the only thing I can see with task manager is total network usage, it looks like MSFS isn’t even trying. When MSFS is functioning correctly, I’ll see multiple Mbps spikes. Starting up, I’ll routinely see up to >50Mbps traffic. But once it starts doing this, there is nothing like that. There is some background sub-Mbps base network traffic from things running in the background in Windows, and an occasional activity spike when things happen like my email is queried, but nothing that could be attributed to MSFS. There are also periodic bursts of upload traffic which correlate with moving the external view around, but nothing seems to come back – in fact, the download is less than the upload. (Figuring area under the curve)
Things I’ve tried that haven’t changed anything:
- Not using a VPN.
- Routing through Proton VPN.
- Routing through Cloudflare Warp VPN.
- Flushing DNS caches.
- Deleting and resetting rolling cache.
- Turning graphics settings way down.
- Using wireless. Using a wired Ethernet connection.
This is a problem with Asobo’s servers, not my PC or Internet connection.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
Every single flight.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Start a flight. Fly for about an hour (sometimes I’ll get 90 minutes). Witness.
YOUR SETTINGS
What peripherals are you using:
[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it? No.
[PC, MSFS 2020 Only] Are you using DX11 or DX12? DX12.
[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use? Nvidia RTX 5090. 24GB VRAM, only using about 12GB at most.
[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share? 3Gbps wired Ethernet connection with no problems with literally anything else.
MEDIA
I can’t even get one because when MSFS spazzes the entire system. Snipping tool doesn’t work. It’s the "“Connection to network lost” “Trying to connect to your network…” screen. The system becomes sluggish. (Resolves if MSFS is killed.)