Oculus has a fix for the mass Oculus Rift outage

Oculus has released a patch to address the error that prevented Oculus Rift users from being able to use their VR headsets yesterday, though the fix itself requires a manual download to install.

The outage itself rightly drew concern from a number of Oculus users and game developers yesterday, with some voicing how damaging a large-scale tech outage could be if one occurred during a major expo or tradeshow.

Now the company has addressed the core issue itself, confirming early suspicions that an expired security certificate was responsible for taking every Oculus Rift headset offline for the bulk of a day.

In a series of forum posts yesterday night, an Oculus representative explained that delivering the fix is a complex issue since efforts to push out an automatic update to affected users were blocked by the expired certificate itself.

So while Oculus has released a fix that’ll solve the problem at hand, the patch must be tracked down and downloaded manually by each Oculus Rift user looking to get their VR headset back online.

In order to get past the “Can’t Reach Oculus Runtime Service” error, Oculus Rift owners will need to head to Oculus’ support site and follow the provided instructions to download and install the March 2018 patch. After a proper installation, the Oculus App will detect and install an update that gets Rifts back up and running again.

For those that may have uninstalled the entire Oculus app out of frustration, redownloading the app from Oculus’ setup page will also do the trick.