Expired Software Certificate Causes 15-hour Oculus Rift Outage

Owning a virtual reality headset makes you part of a very eclectic group of consumers these days. As such, we see overall sales of units such as the Oculus Rift not leaving too many people impressed. This problem is only compounded when that particular headset doesn’t let users access the service for over 15 hours straight. A very worrisome problem, although a software update has been issued.

Oculus Rift Software Bug

Any piece of technology can suffer from issues at some point. Whether it is in the hardware or software side things will wrong sooner or later. For Oculus Rift owners, the bug they encountered is another validation of this unwritten rule. With users unable to access the Oculus runtime service, the headset became rather useless until an update was provided. Oculus quickly acknowledged the problem and issued a fix earlier today.

It seems the problem was on the Facebook-owned company’s end. An expired certificate in the Oculus software causes a global “crash” for all users. Without this native software, the VR headset cannot be operated. It is a central point of failure, in a way and one that created a small PR nightmare for the company over the past two days. Al2hough such a routine problem can occur at any time, taking 15 hours to fix it is simply not acceptable.

According to some sources, the issue was a bit more complex than renewing the certificate. Instead, it blocked the way Oculus could update their headsets. As such, the entire process of working around this issue had to be rebuilt from scratch. An update is in place, but it needs to be installed through the company’s support page on the website. This manual process will certainly annoy a few users, but it’s better than dealing with a non-responsive headset.

Thankfully, all users will receive a compensation for these issues. A $15 credit voucher for their online store has been issued to all users, which is a nice gesture of goodwill. At the same time, it won’t make people feel more happy about buying or owning a VR headset in general. These growing pains need to be sorted out a lot sooner in the future, but for now, we will have to deal with these issues as they arise.

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