FromSoftware has taken the Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 servers offline on every platform, citing an unspecified “server issue” and giving no date for their return. The Dark Souls servers went down on October 30, and the studio has not posted a follow-up since its first announcement.
The outage lands in a difficult week for the Japanese developer. Only days earlier, FromSoftware delayed The Duskbloods out of 2026. Now two of its older games have lost online play entirely, with no explanation of what went wrong.
What FromSoftware said about the Dark Souls servers
The studio announced the shutdown in a short post on X. “Due to a server issue, the game servers for the following titles will be temporarily unavailable on all platforms,” the post reads, before listing Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3.
The statement continues: “We will provide updates once we have information regarding the server restoration time. We apologize for the inconvenience.” According to GamesRadar+, roughly eight hours passed after the post without any further word.
FromSoftware has not said what the issue is. Still, the timing has drawn attention. The outage comes about a week after newly discovered PHP vulnerabilities knocked a number of websites and online services offline. Nobody has confirmed a link between the two. Separately, Dark Souls 2 went through scheduled server maintenance only a couple of days before this shutdown.
The 2022 outage lasted most of a year
Dark Souls players have been here before. In January 2022, Bandai Namco pulled the PC servers for Dark Souls Remastered, Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 after players reported a security exploit. The flaw could let an attacker run code on another player’s PC through the online connection.
Those PC servers stayed down for most of 2022. They eventually came back one game at a time, but for months PC players had no co-op, no invasions and no PvP.
That shutdown only affected PC. This time, the Dark Souls servers are down on all platforms, so players on PlayStation and Xbox are also locked out of online play.
What players lose while the servers are down
Both games lean heavily on online systems. Without servers, players cannot summon others for co-op, invade other worlds or take part in covenant PvP. The messages and bloodstains that other players leave behind as hints and warnings also vanish. The single-player campaigns, however, remain playable offline.
Dark Souls 2 launched in 2014 and Dark Souls 3 followed in 2016. Both still draw active online communities, which is why the 2022 shutdown frustrated so many PC players at the time.
For now, FromSoftware’s only commitment is to share an update once it has a restoration time. Until then, the Dark Souls servers for both games stay offline with no estimate in sight.