The moderators of the official South Park Discord have announced they’re shutting down the server, effective immediately. In a screenshot of the announcement, the volunteer committee shared that over the last two years, regular contact with employees at South Park Digital Studios and parent company Paramount had dried up, going from weekly communications to gaps of up to six months or longer.
“Paramount and South Park Digital Studios have effectively put us in charge of their official property and left us to manage it without consistent support,” the announcement read.
the official south park server has shut down due to the negligence of South Park Studios and Skydance pic.twitter.com/vWtndmGeE3
— sergio (@2206Itssergio) October 12, 2026
A recent update to Discord’s bot policies resulted in one of the server’s moderation bots going offline. Restoring the bot required personal information that the team, being volunteers and subject to doxxing incidents in the past, felt was inappropriate to provide and reached out to Paramount for assistance.
“We felt […]Paramount, as the owner, should’ve completed this process. We received no response,” the moderators wrote.
The recent merger between Paramount and Skydance, completed last week, has only complicated the issue. “We have exhausted all available avenues to attempt contact and the formation of Skydance (The Paramount-WBD merger) has made finding contacts now an impossible task.” Kotaku has reached out to Paramount for comment.
The closing of the official South Park Discord is only one of the numerous negatives to come out of the merger. Another event potentially related to the merger (although calling it a “negative” is subjective) is a recent massive leak of Cartoon Network data. Over 200 gigabytes of information was leaked containing everything from show bibles to background and character art files, storyboards, production guides and more. KFC Spain put together a video featuring assets from the leak before it was swiftly taken down, possibly as result of Skydance dishing out a bunch of DMCA notices, though some X accounts have preserved the video.
Earlier this year the Avatar Aang movie also leaked, although according to the subsequent investigation that led to the arrest of a potential suspect, that one wasn’t Paramount’s fault. The closure of the South Park Discord, though, is. With no communication from the parent company, and no ability to replace the lost moderation bot without significant effort and expense, the volunteer team made the decision to lock the server in the hopes that Paramount gets in touch so it can be restored.
“It is important to remember that we are volunteers who have chosen to do this for the community for free. We are not South Park Digital Studios, Skydance, or Comedy Central staff. We are simply South Park fans.”
