Facebook’s Oculus Rift VR Headsets Disabled Due to Expired Certificate

All of Facebook’s Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets have reportedly been disabled worldwide due to an expired certificate.

TechCrunch reports that that Oculus Rift owners found themselves unable to use their devices recently due to an expired certificate that left the virtual reality headsets disabled. The issue was reportedly first posted to Reddit where users complained that their devices were displaying an error reading, “Can’t reach Oculus Runtime Service.” Reddit user Secoif stated, “Today Oculus decided to update and it never seemed to restart itself, now on manual start I’m getting the above error. Restarting machine and restarting the Oculus service doesn’t appear to work. The OVRLibrary service doesn’t seem to start. Same issue on both my machine and my friend’s machine who updated at the same time.”

The error is reportedly due to the Oculus team’s failure to update an expired certificate in their latest update. This is a blow to the Facebook-owned VR company, which has faced growing criticism for their failure to deliver on major software updates promised at recent developer conferences. Many gamers were left unable to use their $499 headset to play any video games whatsoever for an entire day until Oculus released a fix for the error. A company spokesperson said at the time “Our teams apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you and appreciate your patience while we work on a resolution. We’ll share more updates here as we have them. Thanks.”

Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell took to his Twitter feed to provide updates to Oculus users:

We're aware of an issue affecting Rift on PC, and we're working on resolving now. Stay tuned.

— Nate Mitchell (@natemitchell) March 7, 2018

Following the update to fix the error, Mitchell promised free Oculus Store credit to users affected by the bug.

Rift is back online as of ~12am. This was a mistake on our end, and we apologize. Folks impacted by today's downtime will be provided with an Oculus store credit. More details to follow soon. Thanks again for everyone's patience as we worked through this one.

— Nate Mitchell (@natemitchell) March 8, 2018

The company has now released a full patch for the error, which can be downloaded here, and has published a step-by-step guide on getting the virtual reality headset up and running again.