Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse failure: A digital future that no one wanted

“I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said in late 2021, when he changed Facebook’s name to a parent company called Meta. That was the level of Zuckerberg’s intoxication on his own coolaid. 

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“We expect the metaverse to reach a billion people,” Zuckerberg said confidently, suggesting they’d reach the milestone in a decade. In just half that time, Zuckerberg is already shutting down Metaverse, which has become a monument to tech-fuelled delusion that torched $80 billion from inception.

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In all honesty, by 2023–2024, Zuckerberg had started pivoting Meta’s narrative almost entirely to AI, as the Metaverse hype machine was getting dialled down. So this shutting down announcement of Metaverse doesn’t come as a shock, it was just a matter of when.

Remember, with Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just bet on the future – spectacularly poorly, of course – but he tried to rename reality itself.

We were promised the “successor to the mobile internet” and the ability to “feel present” with friends and other people virtually like what was depicted in the movie Ready Player One. What we got instead was a glitchy corporate waiting room masquerading as a digital utopia, a place even Meta employees reportedly didn’t want to hang out in.

Let’s be brutally clear, for a second, and let’s not delude ourselves like Mark Zuckerberg. The Metaverse wasn’t as much killed as it simply failed to justify its own existence.

Also read: Musk’s ex-GF questions Zuckerberg’s qualification to run Metaverse: Here’s what she said

For five years, Reality Labs (creating Oculus VR to fully bring the metaverse vision to life) lost money like nobody’s business should – nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020 – including over $6 billion just in the last quarter of 2025. Now with Metaverse shuttered down, thousands laid off, and Horizon Worlds now effectively dismantled from VR altogether, this whole exercise feels like industrial scale wishful thinking of the most epic proportions. And for what? A few hundred thousand VR users at best, in a world Zuckerberg promised would host a billion?

Also read: Mark Zuckerberg releases his new digital avatar after hilarious memes

However, I think the real tragedy isn’t that the Metaverse failed. For a couple of years too long – when adoption was stalling, critics called it hollow, even as the rest of the tech world sprinted toward AI – Meta kept pouring billions into a future nobody asked for, and fewer still experienced. 

Zuckerberg’s failure with Metaverse isn’t that he just misread the market, he wrongfully tried to brute-force it into existence – despite all the persistent warning signs. Despite all the marketing decks and VR headsets, we needed something that didn’t feel like a corporate offsite trapped inside a video game engine. What we got instead was cartoon torsos floating in billion-dollar emptiness.

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Jayesh Shinde

Executive Editor at Digit. Technology journalist since Jan 2008, with stints at Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. Enthusiastic dad, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, LOTR nerd, pseudo bon vivant. View Full Profile