A vision that was supposed to define the next era of the internet is being quietly switched off. Meta confirmed that Horizon Worlds will be removed from VR platforms entirely by June 15, downgraded to a standalone mobile app after years of underperformance. The announcement marks the formal end of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse experiment and leaves behind nearly $80 billion in financial losses.
The story of the metaverse is inseparable from the story of Meta’s rebrand. In 2021, Zuckerberg transformed Facebook — a company synonymous with social media — into Meta, an entity whose entire purpose was to build and inhabit a shared virtual universe. He spoke passionately about digital presence, immersive commerce, and a future where the physical and virtual would blur into a seamless experience.
The technology never delivered on that promise at scale. Horizon Worlds remained niche, attracting only a few hundred thousand users at its monthly peak — far short of the billion-user vision Zuckerberg articulated in his 2021 manifesto. The platform lacked the compelling experiences needed to justify the cost and inconvenience of VR headsets, and mainstream adoption never materialized.
The price of the experiment has been extraordinary. Reality Labs, Meta’s division responsible for the metaverse build-out, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020. Early 2025 saw over 1,000 Reality Labs jobs cut, as the company began its formal reorientation toward artificial intelligence and next-generation wearables as more promising avenues for growth.
Social media treated the announcement as dark comedy. Users noted that the platform reportedly had so few users that its closure would be felt by almost no one. The metaverse saga now joins a long list of technology bets that looked transformative on stage and irrelevant in practice — a lesson in the difficulty of building the future before consumers are ready for it.