Oculus accidentally broke thousands of its virtual reality headsets - and then managed to fix them

Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus accidentally broke thousands of its Oculus Rift headsets when it forgot to renew a security certificate for its software.

The Verge reports that Oculus' failure to update its security certificate meant the software which the headsets run on didn't load properly.

That meant many devices simply couldn't be used.

People in the Oculus Reddit community reacted angrily to the issue. "I want you to inundate Oculus with anger about this issue," one user said. "It should not have happened, because that's a big deal to have a cert expire that's installed locally and can't be fixed because the software that would update and fix the cert, doesn't work."

On Thursday, Oculus released an update which fixed the issue. Cofounder Nate Mitchell said on Twitter that "folks impacted by today's downtime will be provided with an Oculus store credit."