The metaverse is shutting down, and almost nobody who was supposed to be using it will be affected. Meta has announced the closure of Horizon Worlds on VR platforms — off the Quest store by March, completely offline in VR by June 15 — leaving Mark Zuckerberg’s most ambitious and costly project as little more than a cautionary footnote in tech history.
The journey began with enormous fanfare in 2021 when Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta and declared the metaverse to be the next chapter of the internet. His 2021 blog post spoke of a billion users, hundreds of billions in virtual commerce, and a creative economy that would employ millions of developers and designers around the world. The ambition was limitless.
What actually materialized was Horizon Worlds, a sparsely populated virtual platform whose cartoonish aesthetic and limited functionality struggled to engage even enthusiastic early adopters. Monthly active users reportedly never crossed a few hundred thousand — a number that made the platform’s purpose and future deeply questionable despite years of continued investment and iteration.
Behind the scenes, the damage was severe. Reality Labs, the Meta unit overseeing VR and metaverse development, has posted nearly $80 billion in total losses since 2020. Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs staff in early 2025, combined with a strategic shift toward AI and wearable devices, made clear that Meta had effectively given up on the original vision.
Online observers responded with biting humor and pointed criticism. One widely shared post questioned how $80 billion could be spent on a virtual world that nobody wanted while real-world crises went unaddressed. The metaverse story is now effectively closed, and its legacy will be shaped by the uncomfortable distance between what was promised and what was delivered.