Oculus Rift headsets should work as normal again

Oculus has promised store credit for affected Rift owners.

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If you own an Oculus Rift headset, good news: It should work as normal again. The Facebook-owned division was caught off guard yesterday when a number of units suddenly stopped working. The problem -- much to Oculus' embarrassment -- was an expired security certificate that checks whether the software you own has come directly from the Oculus Store. The company worked through the night on a fix and finally it's ready as a patch from the Oculus website. It sounds simple enough to install; just download the file, select Repair and then relaunch the Oculus app. That's the promise, anyway — let's hope the problem is finally sorted now.

Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus, confirmed that the problem was fixed by midnight pacific time. He also apologised on behalf of the company to affected Rift owners: "This was a mistake on our end," he said in a tweet. "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." In a customer email, Oculus confirmed that the store credit will be $15, or an equivalent sum if you live outside the US. That's almost enough for Superhot VR or Rez Infinite...