Pokémon Sword and Shield’s online servers have been undergoing emergency maintenance since last night for unknown reasons, leaving a lot of players without the option to trade Pokémon or play with friends.
For those who have been playing the game since launch, the maintenance should come as no surprise. The game is incredibly buggy and laggy at the best of the times, with players being kicked out of Max Raid Battles and trades even when there’s nothing wrong with their connection.
So, when will the servers go live again?
Since this is emergency maintenance, it’s hard to tell when they’ll go live since the problem is still ongoing. Considering the issue has been going for five hours at time of writing with no end in sight, we imagine the game won’t be fixed until at least the early hours of the morning in the Americas.
But it could take days for the problem to be fixed, in theory. There’s no telling what caused the issue, but Nintendo and Game Freak probably won’t let the servers go live until they have fixed whatever was causing the problem in the first place.
Our advice to anyone affected by this issue is to just sit tight and wait. Game Freak has plans to also do some further maintenance on the titles’ servers on Nov. 26 for a few hours, so the servers will be down then, too.
To keep track of server statuses, as well as updates from the Game Freak team to know when the servers will be live again, use Nintendo’s support website.
