Dark Souls Went Offline. FromSoftware Won't Explain Why.

On October 30, 2026, FromSoftware switched off online play for Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, on every platform, with no explanation and no return date. The fans had already built their own way back online. This is the story of what went dark: the messages, bloodstains, summons and invasions that made strangers part of your game; the 2022 bug that let another player take over your PC through the official servers; PHP2Shell, a flaw that sat in PHP since 2012 until AI helped researchers turn it into an attack within days; the month publishers reached for the off switch (Capcom pulled Street Fighter V offline, citing PHP); and how fans rebuilt the network by hand, from Yui's Seamless Co-op to Tim Leonard's open-source Dark Souls III server, ds3os. FromSoftware has not said what caused the shutdown, and nothing in this video claims it was PHP or AI. Security details stay at the level of the published write-ups. Facts are as of November 1, 2026. Chapters: 0:00 Firekeepers 0:50 Strangers ahead 2:13 Be wary of holes 4:44 Could this be a bug? 7:10 No server ahead 8:24 Praise the firekeepers! 11:24 If only I had a server... When a publisher switches a game off, should it have to hand players the server, the way Velan did with Knockout City? Tell me in the comments. PLAY SAFE Only download mods from their authors' own pages. Within two days of the shutdown, fake "Dark Souls III online co-op" downloads appeared. Seamless Co-op for Dark Souls III: https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls3/... Seamless Co-op for Dark Souls II: https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/... ds3os, Dark Souls Open Server: https://github.com/TLeonardUK/ds3os THE PEOPLE IN THIS VIDEO Yui (formerly LukeYui): Seamless Co-op for Elden Ring, Nightreign, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, the Armored Core VI co-op mod, and the anti-cheat mods Blue Sentinel and Blue Acolyte. Support them:   / yuiamoroll   Tim Leonard and the ds3os contributors (tremwil, Church Guard, GrimKriegor and others). tremwil: found and published the 2022 Dark Souls III bug, and wrote the server-side fix that reached ds3os 159 days before the official patch. Glenn Fiedler: networking code for Journey, God of War and Titanfall. SOURCES FromSoftware's notices, Oct 30, 2026 (Japanese and English): https://x.com/fromsoftware_sp/status/... and https://x.com/fromsoftware_sp/status/... VGC on the 2022 bug: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/n... NVD: CVE-2022-24125 and CVE-2022-24126 PHP2Shell: Calif https://calif.io/php2shell/ and Wiz https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php... 404 Media on Black October: https://www.404media.co/php2shell-bla... GamesBeat on Glenn Fiedler: https://gamesbeat.com/network-expert-... VGC on Street Fighter V: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/n... Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=... Tim Leonard, "Reverse Engineering Dark Souls 3 Networking", parts 1-7 (2022): https://timleonard.uk/ Video Games Europe (Jul 2025): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/07... Dexerto on the California AB 1921 hearing: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/stop-k... Also: darksouls.jp notices (2022); Kotaku on World Quest; ds3os pull requests 127 and 231; the DeSSE README; Nexus Mods download counts and Yui's Patreon posts (Jun 29 and Oct 18, 2026); SteamCharts; r/darksouls3 and r/DarkSouls2; Homecoming's City of Heroes license (Jan 2024); Gematsu and VGC on Knockout City; the Pretendo Network forum; Wikipedia, "PHP2Shell". FOOTAGE Shown muted for commentary: gameplay captures by MKIceAndFire, Ushak the Obvious, Warp, Thermal Shoes, Fighter. PL, Nikk3D, Red Leliana, proteh, Ulteriortech9, tokyo, WBI and VideoGameAmbience; Seamless Co-op footage from Yui's own announcement and release videos; trailers by Bandai Namco, FromSoftware and Capcom. Notices and posts from X, Reddit, Hacker News, Patreon and GitHub are re-set word for word. Thumbnails use frames from the Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin and Dark Souls III launch trailers.