All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

Someone at Oculus screwed up pretty badly today: An expired certificate appears to have soft-bricked all of the company’s Rift VR headsets, with users still unable to fire up software on the devices and no word of an incoming fix from the company yet.

Issues were first reported several hours ago on Reddit, where a post on the topic has already garnered hundreds of comments. The problem seems to have resulted from Oculus failing to update an expired certificate with the update, which is now leaving users with an error message saying that the system “Can’t reach Oculus Runtime Service.”

Update: The company has confirmed that the problem is a result of “an issue with our software certification…”

Users are not happy.

The embarrassing issue has left the company’s flagship device unusable. This comes as the company continues to deliver major software updates that it announced at its most recent developer conference. This issue is a bummer to gamers who aren’t going to get to play the titles they’ve purchased until the issue is resolved — but it’s a much less forgivable issue for commercial users who use the headset.

Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell confirmed on Twitter that there was an issue affecting the company’s Rift headset.

We’ve reached out to Oculus for more details.

Some users are reporting that they’ve been able to get things back up-and-running by messing with their system clock, but this is generally a bad solution and can often screw up a lot of things, so it’s probably best to wait for a patch from Oculus.

An Oculus staffer on the company’s forums further confirmed the issues, apologizing on behalf of the company. “Our teams apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you and appreciate your patience while we work on a resolution. We’ll share more updates here as we have them. Thanks.”