Minecraft will take an extremely long time to load from the starting menu but will then take you to a menu to sign in with a free Microsoft account. Once signed in the game will again take a very long time to load the start game menu and eventually prompt you to login to a Microsoft account again. This can repeat several times and eventually crashes the game before you can even load a world.

If you manage to get past the prompts and load a game, it will take an extremely long time and eventually crash causing the need to reset your switch before continuing. Furthermore, if you eventually do load a world, it does not appear for others to join in multiplayer, and therefore a game restart is required to enable this causing the risk of crashes for another time. 

Since the new update both myself and friends have not been able to load or play the game.