Oculus Rift headset shutdown issues fixed with the latest software update

Users of the Oculus Rift faced the problem of their VR not working and/or shutting down. This problem persisted worldwide. Their headsets stopped running completely and displayed the message, “ Can’t Reach oculus runtime service.” Oculus and its parent company Facebook remained silent for a while about this problem. They were not on fixing the problem for long period of time. However, the source of the problem has been unveiled and it appears that a certificate for the Oculus runtime service was allowed to expire earlier.

Later, both Oculus and Facebook recognized the problem and publicly addressed the problem with the following message, “We are aware of and actively investigating an issue impacting ability to access Rift software. 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.” The tweet that held the acknowledgment of the problem was released earlier today along with a list of a support forum post. This was done after the users began reporting the problem in the Oculus forums.

Also, some users discovered the issue on the Oculus forums that OculusAppFramework.dll failed to validate with OVRSERVER. This OVRSERVER is the local Oculus runtime service. Many users received the message that the crash might be because of the expired certificate.

Hey all – thank for your patience. We now have an Oculus software update in place that fixes the issue where Rift may fail to start up. For more info and instructions, please go here: https://t.co/gYz2G4Fon7
Thank you once again for your patience.

— Meta Quest Gaming (@MetaQuestGaming) March 8, 2018

The Oculus Rift support team took immediate action on the issue and brought up the latest Oculus Rift Software update which was announced via Twitter. The Oculus Rift fix updates the issue where the rift was failing to start up. Nate Mitchell, the co-founder of Oculus, has promised on a Reddit thread that he will try to push the updates and as he committed, the new software update arrives, bringing all the required fixes.