With the American technology company Oculus having permanently reduced the price of its Rift VR headsets to $400 a few months ago, there's no doubt that many virtual reality enthusiasts jumped at the chance to snag the bundle in order to experience what it has to offer. Unfortunately, though, these folks and a plethora of other users recently experienced a technical error that caused their headsets to go offline and become inoperable.
As recently reported by myriad Oculus Rift owners just yesterday, users had been encountering “Can’t Reach Oculus Runtime Service” and “Failed to initialize with Oculus: Signature Invalid” error messages, with most having been unable to launch games and apps. Apparently, the problem has now been identified by the company to be the result of an expired security certificate, with Oculus initially stating, “For security, we use a certificate to ensure that the software you receive actually comes from Oculus. That certificate has expired, and we’re looking at a few different ways to resolve the issue.”
Thankfully, Oculus has now released a fix to the Rift issue caused by an expired security certificate, with users able to download a new patch that ought to take care of the problem for the foreseeable future. Those jonesing for the fix will need to manually download and install this patch.
Those who didn't encounter Oculus' expired security certificate issue, or users who haven’t used their Rift in a while will see their hardware automatically download the patch and install it. For anyone who had been affected by the outage, Oculus is now offering $15 in store credit. Apparently, the credit will show up in users' accounts within the next seven days, but it will only be given to those who used their Rift on or after February 1, 2018.
All things considered, this expired security certificate issue undoubtedly miffed many Oculus Rift owners, and could have been avoided completely on the tech firm's end. At any rate, perhaps some will let bygones be bygones and now simply try to enjoy such wares as Oculus Rift's seven-episode VR experience for the Nicolas Cage film The Humanity Bureau.
The Oculus Rift is available now.