The Dark Souls servers are offline again. FromSoftware has pulled the game servers for Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and there’s no word on when they’ll be back. The studio’s player support account posted the notice at 1:45am PT on Friday, October 30.
“Due to a server issue, the game servers for the following titles will be temporarily unavailable on all platforms,” the post reads. “We will provide updates once we have information regarding the server restoration time.”
A Japanese notice on the same account went up first, at 12:01am PT. It says FromSoftware found a fault in the game servers and stopped them on every platform, and that it will post a separate update once it knows when they’ll return. Neither post says what the fault is. As of Friday afternoon, there’s no follow-up.
What’s gone for now
Anything that runs through FromSoftware’s servers is off in both games. That means:
- Co-op. No summon signs from other players, so no help on bosses.
- Invasions and PvP. No red phantoms dropping into your world, and no arena or covenant matchmaking.
- Messages and bloodstains. The notes other players leave on the ground, and the replays of how they died, won’t show up.
- Ghosts. You won’t see other players’ phantoms passing through your world.
What still works
Both games are full single-player campaigns, and the shutdown covers the game servers only, so you can still play them start to finish on your own.
The notice names only Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III. It doesn’t mention Dark Souls Remastered, Elden Ring or any other FromSoftware game, and it doesn’t say which release of Dark Souls II it covers, the original or Scholar of the First Sin.
This has happened before, but only on PC
Dark Souls players have been here once already. 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.” That one was PC only. The account said at the time that Xbox and PlayStation servers weren’t affected.
It took most of the year to undo. Dark Souls III on PC got its online features back on August 25, 2022. Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin followed on October 25, and the original PC version of Dark Souls II came back on November 30. The 2012 PC release, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, never got online back. FromSoftware said it couldn’t support it “due to an aging system.”
This time consoles are included from the start, which makes it a wider outage than 2022 on day one. FromSoftware hasn’t said whether it expects a quick fix or a longer one.
What happens next
FromSoftware hasn’t asked players to do anything. The restoration notice will come from the FromSoftware Player Support account on X, and we’ll update this post when the servers come back.
It’s the second FromSoftware story this week, after the studio delayed The Duskbloods to 2027 on Switch 2.