Facebook outage highlights biggest flaw with Meta Quest headsets
Dexerto Most of Meta’s services experienced an outage that left many users of Meta Quest VR headsets frustrated due to one design decision.
Meta recently announced that it would be deleting all legacy Oculus accounts, and anyone wanting to continue to use their Oculus or Meta VR headsets would need to move over to a Meta account, which ties together the VR services along with Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. This turned out to be a big flaw when most of Meta’s online services experienced an outage.
The Meta outage lasted for only a couple of hours, but its impact was felt worldwide as users of Facebook, Instagram, and the Meta Quest found themselves suddenly logged out and unable to log back in.
Users of the Meta Quest quickly discovered that without the ability to log in to their account, the headset was functionally useless. Some users took to social media to express their anger and confusion at the decision to not include any method of playing while offline.
Quest users express frustration
Over on Reddit, users of r/OculusQuest like Leeloo7 were baffled as to why the headset would not work unless they were logged in, saying: “If for any reason Facebook servers go down my device softbricks itself and becomes a paperweight. Why does software have to be this way?”
Dexerto Other users of the subreddit expressed sympathy for this viewpoint, with user NoMeasurement6473 comparing it to other online services, saying: “Steam does it so you only have to connect every 30 or something days to reauthenticate. Why don’t they do that?”
Some users complained that Meta was poor at communicating what the problem was, as many users had no idea why they could no longer use their headsets, as Reddit user Deemo_here put it: “I think they need a better error message than ‘something is wrong’! Something like ‘Our servers are down so don’t panic’”.
Either way, it highlights one way that the Quest platform might be more limiting than you might think, as headsets quickly become paperweights whenever servers go down.