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A non-inconsequential number of new Quest 3 and 3S headsets couldn’t update properly this past Christmas, leaving some users scrambling for last-minute replacements or knee deep in support chats looking for a fix to their freshly bricked VR headsets. Now, Meta has clarified just what transpired. And it wasn’t a buggy update either, as previously thought.

Mark Rabkin, Meta Vice President of VR/MR, took to X to explain why some Quest users were left to deal with spiraling boot loops on Christmas Day, forcing Meta to pause its latest v72 software update and ship affected users fresh units while it figured out the problem.

V72 is awesome, we paused it for a while to make damn sure it doesn’t contribute to the update issues. We tracked that down btw – rare race condition in AOSP R/W ext4 filesystem that corrupts files + a key security patch that prevents OS rollback. Fixed bug and upstreaming.

— Mark Rabkin (@mrabkin) January 20, 2025

Essentially, Rabkin is describing a rare and long-undetected bug in the read/write (R/W) file system used by the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)—meaning it wasn’t a problem specific to Quest’s Horizon OS.

The “race condition” Rabkin refers to is a behavior where the outcome depends on the sequence or timing of events, such as two processes accessing shared data simultaneously. These bugs are typically rare and difficult to reproduce. The specific bug in question, which he notes is actually four years old, caused file corruption during updates. These updates are required whenever a new Quest device is booted up for the first time.

While Meta introduced a software update tool last June that allows you to force OS updates via a PC tether, Quest critically doesn’t allow OS rollbacks, which exacerbated the problem.

Rabkin says that after fixing the bug, Meta is now “upstreaming” the fix, contributing their solution to the broader AOSP to help other developers avoid similar issues in the future.

You can sideload content with privately-distributed APKs—as with most Android devices—although Quest is pretty obstinate when it comes to letting intrepid users muck around with anything under the hood, something that’s challenged jailbreakers in the past looking to divorce Quest from Meta services and do things like install custom ROMS and mods.

At the time of this writing, there is no widely publicized, confirmed jailbreak for Quest 3, although there have been attempts in the past. In late 2020, a crowd-funded group, which even attracted cash from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, spurred on the race to jailbreak Quest 2, which, at the time, led an apparently successful method.

That specific jailbreak however was ostensibly debunked, as it was claimed the leading submission actually used a Virtual Machine (VM) to emulate a boot-unlock.