Oculus early adopters furious when orders get delayed for months

The Oculus Rift has officially been out for about two weeks -- but you wouldn't know it.

For every person who has happily received their virtual reality headset, there are dozens more online who haven't. After future Rift owners pre-ordered on Jan. 6 -- waiting through uncooperative servers and shopping cart issues -- the earliest ones were promised they'd get their Rifts in late March/early April.

That really hasn't been the case.

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Oculus sent an email to many customers on April 2, saying the following:

We know you're anxious to receive your Oculus Rift and apologize for not updating your order status sooner. We've been working through an unexpected component shortage, and unfortunately, that issue has impacted the original shipping estimates for some early customers.

In that email, it promised an update on order statuses by Tuesday. On Monday night, customers received an email saying orders had been updated with a new delivery window. "This window may be later than your original estimate, due to the early component shortage," the email read.

That statement doesn't quite capture just how far back Rift pre-orders have been pushed. Users flocked to the r/Oculus subreddit to share order times pushed into May, June or even July for those who had been in the first few minutes to hour of the pre-order rush. The thread for order updates now has close to 3,000 comments.  

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Oculus offered the below statement when reached for comment:

"The component shortage impacted our quantities more than we expected, and we’ve updated the shipment window to reflect these changes. We apologize for the delay.

We’re delivering Rifts to customers every day, and we’re focused on getting Rifts out the door as fast as we can. We’ve taken steps to address the component shortage, and we’ll continue shipping in higher volumes each week. We’ve also increased our manufacturing capacity to allow us to deliver in higher quantities, faster. Many Rifts will ship less than four weeks from original estimates, and we hope to beat the new estimates we’ve provided."

Founder Palmer Luckey seemed to say as much in a Reddit post last week. 

"I won't give in-depth updates on any situation without knowing it is solid, true, and finalized. Until I can do so, the best I can do is remind people that I will get them information as quickly as I can.

On the rare occasions when things still change, even when they change for reasons out of my control, I get crucified anyway. Sometimes that means updates have to wait until things get locked down, and sometimes that means waiting a little longer to give everyone good info."

Oculus is offering free shipping on all pre-orders as a mea culpa to users, though it may have to do more to sooth them.

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