Nearly All Oculus Rift VR Headsets Stopped Working

VR technology is still a growing medium. We don't expect it to be perfect. Even so, nearly all Oculus Rift users were left frustrated yesterday with the headset brand when devices all over the world stopped functioning.

If you tried to play a VR game with the Oculus Rift recently, you likely ran into an error with the Oculus Runtime Service. Upon the error's discovery, the Oculus app couldn't be restarted, rendering the headset useless. This problem is affecting everyone from home users to professional developers in the middle of a tech demo.

The cause of this problem? The software's security certificate expired, according to the Oculus support team.

That certificate has expired, and were looking at a few different ways to resolve the issue. Well update you with the latest info as available. We recommend you wait until we provide an official fix. Thanks for your patience.

And fix it they did, technically. The company eventually solved the issue, but don't expect it to simply get better. Users are required to perform the repair process themselves. Oculus provides instructions to do this, which consists of manually downloading and installing a patch.

My sympathies go out to those inconvenienced by this.