Dark Souls 3's PC servers seem to be back online again
There's been no formal announcement just yet, though.
They've been up, down, up, down, down, up, and down again, but right now, Dark Souls 3' PC servers are live once again.
Bandai Namco was originally forced to shutter the PC PvP servers for all Dark Souls games back in January following "reports of an issue with online servers". Although the publisher described the situation as "temporary", it took over seven months for a fix to be deployed, with Dark Souls 3's servers finally coming back online at the end of August… and going down again earlier this week.
On 21st September, Bandai Namco said "there is a confirmed issue with Dark Souls 3 online play via the Steam platform" and revealed that it was "investigating the source of the problem", but the servers remained offline for several days.
While Dark Souls' social media account remain quiet, players on the game's subreddit forums are reporting that PC servers are reportedly back on again. How long for, though, is anyone's guess…
While the publisher stopped short of specifying what the issue specifically was when it took multiplayer offline at the beginning of the year, posts on the Elden Ring subreddit stated that it was "possible for Dark Souls 3 invaders to run code on your PC without permission. AKA RCE, Remote Code Execution. This same hack is possible in Elden Ring".
RCE hacks enable unscrupulous players to hack and take control of opponents' PC and was reportedly discovered when a streamer fell victim to the hack whilst livestreaming. The hacker purports they'd tried to contact FromSoftware about the vulnerability but received no response, so felt their only recourse was to target livestreamers on air.