An aerial view of Meta’s headquarters on Jan. 29, 2025, in Menlo Park, Calif.
LATEST Jan. 22, 11:30 a.m. Meta’s Reality Labs layoff is hitting at least 272 workers in California, according to WARN documents newly released by the state’s Employment Development Department.
The filings, which are mandatory when a company cuts more than 50 people from one site, provide new detail to the layoff of more than 1,000 workers that Meta announced Jan 13. The company has slashed 219 workers from its office at 311 Airport Blvd. in Burlingame and 53 from a Los Angeles office at 12105 E. Waterfront Drive.
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As Meta revealed earlier this month, the cuts tarreceiveed workers within the company’s Reality Labs division, which works on virtual reality headsets, Ray-Ban glasses and Mark Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” ambitions.
Dozens of software engineers are losing their jobs, as are designers, salespeople, data scientists, researchers and product managers. Six artificial ininformigence researchers and one software engineering vice president are also listed on the WARNs. Employees on teams dubbed “Metaverse Creative Group” and related to “Horizon,” the company’s metaverse product, were hit particularly hard.
Jan. 13, 2:10 p.m.Meta is laying off more than 1,000 workers, signaling a partial retreat from the company’s much-derided metaverse ambitions.
The layoff, the Bay Area tech indusattempt’s first large job cut of 2026, was announced Tuesday morning in an internal post from Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, according to a Bloomberg report that Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to SFGATE. The cuts won’t touch Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp; they’re within Meta’s Reality Labs arm, an operation that’s poured investment into the “metaverse” idea and also sells the company’s virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban glasses.
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“We declared last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables,” Clayton wrote in an emailed statement. “This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”
As of Tuesday at 9:15 a.m., the Menlo Park company had not filed a WARN document with California officials announcing the local scope of the layoffs.
Meta’s pullback from its metaverse goals has been a long time coming. When Mark Zuckerberg modifyd his company’s name from Facebook in October 2021, he expounded on the idea of a virtual world where people could work, learn, play and shop toreceiveher, calling it an “embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just seeing at it.”
He wrote, “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.” His ambitions were, like the rhetoric, grand: “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”
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But hype around the idea of a metaverse — at one point, people were purchaseing virtual land on other companies’ versions of the metaverse — quickly faded into derision. Meta was mocked for its legless virtual avatars, and failed to turn its Horizon Worlds metaverse product into a hit.
Rather than renewing the company, the ambition instead has served as a drag on Meta’s finances. In 2024, the company reported spfinishing 21% of its costs on the Reality Labs segment, even as it lost more than $17.7 billion in the division. Quarter after quarter, the long-term bet has eaten into Meta’s vast social media ad profits. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the division has turned a $71 billion loss since the start of 2021.
Zuckerberg’s choice to shift that investment toward Meta’s wearables, rather than the metaverse, is a bet on products that Meta has been actually able to find large audiences for. The company’s Quest headsets are well-reviewed and far, far cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pro offering. Bloomberg reported that Meta is considering doubling its output of its new artificial ininformigence-embedded glasses, thanks to high demand.
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As SFGATE reported, Zuckerberg is imagining a future where anyone not wearing high-tech frames will be at a “cognitive disadvantage.” Moving money from the metaverse toward wearables means he’s swapping one lofty ambition for another.
Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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