Oculus Rift VR Working Again After Fixing Expired Certificate

By Ela Teodosio, Christian Post Contributor Friday, March 09, 2018

Oculus Rift announces that all its headsets are working again after an embarrassing incident that rendered all devices unusable on Wednesday.

According to Oculus, the team was as surprised by the incident as all the users. It was negligence on the part of the Facebook-owned company, which failed to notice that one of its security certificates, which checks whether the software came directly from the Oculus Store, has expired.

Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus, said the team worked diligently to fix the problem by midnight Pacific Time. "This was a mistake on our end, and we apologize," he wrote on Twitter. A patch is now available for all users affected by the incident. Customers could simply go to the Oculus website, download the file, select Repair, and re-launch the Oculus app.

A direct link to the file and more detailed instructions for repair can be seen in the Tweet below.

To appease users whose virtual reality (VR) experience was interrupted by the incident, Oculus promised a store credit as a form of apology. "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," continue Mitchell on Twitter.

According to a customer email, the store credit is worth $15, a substantial sum for those coveting video games like "Superhot VR" and "Rez Infinite."

This should be enough to calm down players who turned to Reddit on Wednesday after they repeatedly encountered the message "Can't reach Oculus Runtime Service" while using the device. For some, the mistake itself was acceptable, but the lack of information from the Oculus team was frustrating.

Fans of the VR headset aired their ire on the platform, after apparently not getting any notification from Oculus or even a confirmation that a problem exists. Many players reportedly wasted a lot of time uninstalling and installing their devices, thinking that the problem came from their end.