Meta just pulled the plug on Horizon Workrooms, the corporate VR collaboration platform that Mark Zuckerberg championed just before rebranding to Meta two years ago. The company is nuking commercial VR entirely - ending sales of enterprise headsets and managed services effective February 2026. It's the clearest sign yet that Zuckerberg's metaverse vision has completely pivoted away from the fully immersive VR world he once imagined.
Meta just announced it's shutting down Horizon Workrooms on February 16, 2026, according to a help page notice that landed quietly in the company's support docs. The announcement feels almost apologetic - "Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app" - yet it represents a stunning reversal of the company's VR-first strategy.
The real blow lands days later. Meta is also stopping sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial Quest headsets effective February 20, effectively nuking its entire enterprise VR push. Any existing customers get free licenses after February, but the signal is unmistakable: corporate VR isn't happening.
This came after Meta just laid off roughly 1,000 people from Reality Labs - about 10% of the entire division. In the cascade of job cuts that followed, the company shuttered three of its hard-won VR game studios. It's also killing Supernatural, Meta's flagship VR fitness app that actually had real users, and gutted the team behind Batman: Arkham Shadow.
The Horizon Workrooms shutdown is particularly stinging because Zuckerberg personally introduced the app to us back in August 2021, just two months before he pivoted the entire company toward the metaverse concept. He stood in a virtual conference room and pitched it as the future of remote work - avatars collaborating in 3D space with virtual whiteboards and persistent workspaces. It was supposed to be the killer app that made VR mandatory for business.
But it never caught on. Enterprise adoption stayed minimal. Most workers preferred Zoom, Teams, and regular video calls. The idea that you'd strap on a headset for an 8-hour workday never materialized. Now Meta's moving on.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth already flagged the direction shift in an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg. The company's Horizon team will "double down on bringing the best Horizon experiences and AI creator tools to mobile" instead. Translation: forget the headsets. The metaverse is now on your phone.
