A shutdown with no timetable
If you were planning a weekend of invasions or summons in Dark Souls II or Dark Souls III, you’re out of luck for now, and FromSoftware can’t yet say for how long. As of Sunday 1 November, none of the coverage we checked reports either game’s servers as back.
The studio’s player support account announced the shutdown on X on October 30. The English post, as quoted by Inven Global, read: “Due to a server issue, the game servers for the following titles will be temporarily unavailable on all platforms,” and “We will provide updates once we have information regarding the server restoration time.” Inven Global says a Japanese-language notice on the same account went up about an hour and 45 minutes earlier (Pacific time) with a similar message about a fault in the game servers, and that the studio apologised for the inconvenience in both posts.
What the notice does and doesn’t say
Here’s the whole of what we know. The servers are down on every platform. Neither post explained what the fault was, and Game*Spark reports that the nature and cause haven’t been disclosed. We aren’t going to guess at one.
Nothing in the notice or the coverage we read says the single-player games themselves are affected; the announcement is about the game servers. PC Gamer describes the lost features as multiplayer: invasions, co-op and messages. Anything that depends on those servers should be treated as unavailable until FromSoftware says otherwise.
The 2022 precedent, and what’s different
This isn’t the series’ first dark spell. On January 23, 2022, the official Dark Souls account said PvP servers for Dark Souls III, Dark Souls II and Dark Souls: Remastered had been “temporarily deactivated to allow the team to investigate recent reports of an issue with online services,” according to Inven Global. That shutdown only hit the PC versions; the account said console PvP servers on Xbox and PlayStation were not affected.
Recovery took most of that year. Online features for the PC version of Dark Souls III returned on August 25, 2022, and Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin followed on October 25, 2022. Dark Souls: Remastered on PC was reactivated on November 9, 2022, while the account said online services for the 2012 PC release, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, would not come back “due to an aging system.”
The differences this time: it covers Dark Souls II and III only, and it covers console players as well as PC. PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield says that gives him some hope the issue is less serious and quicker to resolve. That’s a reasonable hunch, but it’s only a hunch, since FromSoftware hasn’t said what’s wrong.
Where this leaves players
PC Gamer also notes that Yui’s Seamless Co-op series for these games runs on its own servers, separate from the official FromSoftware ones. It’s a PC-only footnote; FromSoftware’s own online modes are what’s down.
We think the honest read is to plan for a wait. The 2022 shutdown was a different situation, but it’s the only precedent in the series that our sources give us, and it ran for months. A plain status note every few days, even one that says “still investigating,” would cost the studio nothing and beat the silence. Outages with thin explanations aren’t unique to FromSoftware either: GOG pulled its store and launcher offline for “maintenance” and didn’t say why.
FromSoftware has other things on its calendar, too: The Duskbloods slips to 2027 for a final rules and balance pass. For the Dark Souls games, the next news we’re waiting on is the restoration time the studio has promised to post through its player support account.
Sources checked on Sunday 1 November 2026: FromSoftware’s player support posts as reported by Inven Global and Game*Spark, and PC Gamer.
