Two months before it rebranded as Meta, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rolled out Horizon Workrooms as the metaverse for work, a virtual room where colleagues were meant to “collaborate” without leaving their sofas.
Now Meta is killing it, with a note on a help page that reads: “Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026,”
The corporate VR sales pitch is being folded up and stuffed in a drawer. Another help page says: “We are stopping sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial SKUs of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 2026.”
This lands right after Meta laid off roughly 10 per cent of its Reality Labs division, more than 1,000 jobs.
In the churn, it is getting harder to pretend Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” still means VR headsets and virtual meeting rooms, not mobile apps and smart glasses with a fresh coat of hype.
Reports say the layoffs wiped out three of Meta’s VR game studios, after another one was shuttered in 2024, which is not great news if you were hoping for a steady pipeline of headset-worthy content.
It has been reported that Meta has walked away from future development of Supernatural, its standout VR fitness app, and has taken a machete to the team behind Batman: Arkham Shadow.
Meta still has Horizon Worlds sitting there, and the only reason it looks safer is that it exists on phones where normal people are.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said the company’s Horizon team will “double down on bringing the best Horizon experiences and AI creator tools to mobile” in a memo, leaving VR work meetings as yesterday’s dress up.
