An expired software certificate has caused every Oculus Rift in the world to malfunction. The Facebook subsidiary has confirmed the problem, and it says it is working on a fix.
Most people are encountering an error that says the Oculus software “can’t reach Oculus runtime service.” This is due an expired security certificate on Windows. Essentially, Microsoft checks software to ensure it is signed by the vendor when it goes to read data from other files to prevent hackers from stealing your personal information. But vendors have to work with Microsoft to keep that signature up-to-date. Oculus has seemingly let its certificate authentication lapse.
We're aware of an issue affecting Rift on PC, and we're working on resolving now. Stay tuned.
— Nate Mitchell (@natemitchell) March 7, 2018
“We are aware of and actively investigating an issue impacting ability to access Rift software,” reads a post on the Oculus forums. “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.”
If you have to get into virtual reality right now, and you can’t wait for an Oculus fix, some Rift owners have found a workaround. Because the certificate is based on date-and-time, you can edit your system time in Windows to “reactivate” the authentication.
Here’s an explanation of how to do that from Reddit user Mace404:
For the ones having trouble setting their time in Windows:
- Press start/Windows key and type: cmd – right click that and start as administrator
- In the new window type: time
- Enter the desired time, for example 03:00 (just anything below 13:00 is fine if you do this today)
- Restart the Oculus software by executing the following commands in the same cmd window.
net stop OVRService
net start OVRService- Then start the oculus client by running %OCULUSBASE%Supportoculus-clientOculusClient.exe
- Just let my Oculus software update and the OculusAppFramework.dll file has a new certificate, so after that you can set the time back to normal.
(you can run the command “w32tm /resync” to trigger windows to update the time with a time server automatically)
If you don’t want to mess around with that, Oculus should have a fix available soon.