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altforbadopinions
New Participant
March 29, 2026
Question

Quest 3 Update bricked headset

Essentially, after a length of not using my quest 3 I put it on and updated it, which made it completely lose tracking and endlessly get stuck on "Updating Right Controller (FAILED)" when rebooting. IT was working almost perfectly fine before this and I have already tried to sideload the latest (or older) firmware onto it, which didn't work. I can use it to some extent but the experience is horrible, passthrough is completely black and everything is constantly moving around

9 replies

steve40
steve40
Honored Contributor
March 30, 2026

You're describing an inside‑out tracking camera failure. That's a hardware issue - not "bricking," and not something caused by the update. The update happened simply because the headset was out of date after sitting unused.

The camera failure itself occurred during that long period of disuse, but you only discovered it once you powered the headset back on and the tracking system initialized. The timing makes it look like the update caused the problem, but the two events aren't connected. Hardware doesn't wait politely for you to return; it can degrade quietly in the background.

Similar issue:

Quest 2 camera's not tracking properly? | Meta Community Forums - 1370553

    altforbadopinionsAuthor
    New Participant
    March 30, 2026

    It was functioning perfectly fine, tracking and passthrough included, to the very second it restarted to update itself. Clearly this is not a hardware issue

    steve40
    steve40
    Honored Contributor
    March 30, 2026

    You also said that sideloading older firmware/software didn't fix it? That suggests it's a hardware issue.

      altforbadopinionsAuthor
      New Participant
      March 30, 2026

      Yes. I first tried to update it using meta's own browser based tool, which did nothing to change the situation, then I used ADB with platform tools. No effect. I can get far enough into the heaset to see that in the software update section it still says "You're all up to date", so I'm guessing meta has something blocking downgrading the Quest 3's firmware, which is very unfortunate.

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