Around 6 months ago, Dark Souls 3 was struck with a security vulnerability that put personal data of users in danger. Due to this reason, Bandai Namco simply shut down the online services of the game and there was no news about it since.
Recently, a dataminer called Lance McDonald noticed a new update on SteamDB for Dark Souls 3. First thing that came to mind was that Bandai Namco could be testing the online features again so they can turn the servers back on as they promised to do so.
The latency in this process is actually not surprising since the launch of Elden Ring kept FromSoftware and Bandai Namco quite busy in recent months. Considering the success and dedication in the project, obviously it was a good reason.
It was lucky that companies managed to resolve this without much damage, but players were understandably bitter about the servers being disabled. If these findings are true, it may not be long before the servers come up again.