Meta Explains Large Number of Quest Headsets Malfunctioning Last Christmas

During the holiday season, many new Quest 3 and 3S headset owners faced a frustrating issue when their devices failed to update successfully, leaving them seeking replacements or trying to fix what seemed like newly bricked headsets. Meta has since provided some clarity on what actually occurred, and it turns out a faulty update wasn’t the culprit.

Mark Rabkin, the Vice President of VR at Meta, took to X to shed some light on why some users found themselves trapped in boot loops on Christmas. To address the confusion, Meta had to halt the rollout of their new v72 software update and promise affected users new units while they investigated the matter.

Rabkin explained, “V72 is awesome, and we paused it momentarily to ensure it doesn’t add to the update problems. We zeroed in on the issue – a rare race condition in the read/write ext4 filesystem of AOSP, which corrupts files along with a key security patch that blocks OS rollback. We’ve sorted out the bug and are now sharing the fix upstream.”

In essence, Rabkin pointed out a highly uncommon bug within the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) file system—meaning it wasn’t something related specifically to Quest’s Horizon OS. This “race condition” is a term that describes a tricky situation where the outcome relies on the order or timing of events, like two processes accessing shared data simultaneously. Such bugs are notoriously hard to reproduce. The bug in question, dating four years back, led to file corruption during updates necessary when initializing a new Quest device.

Although Meta introduced a tool last June enabling forced OS updates via a PC connection, the inability to roll back updates on Quest complicated things further. Rabkin mentions that after patching the bug, Meta is now “upstreaming” the solution, ensuring other developers in the AOSP community can steer clear of similar challenges moving forward.

While Quest devices, akin to other Android gadgets, support sideloading with private APKs, they remain quite resistant to users tinkering with the core system. This has posed hurdles for those trying to unlock Quest from Meta’s ecosystem to install custom ROMs and modifications.

Currently, no publicized or verified jailbreak for Quest 3 exists, although there have been attempts. Back in late 2020, a spirited effort by a crowd-funded group, supported even by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, pursued a jailbreak for Quest 2, leading at the time to an apparently successful breakthrough.

However, that particular jailbreak was reportedly debunked when it was revealed the leading solution merely used a Virtual Machine (VM) to simulate a boot-unlock.