To the surprise of no one, Meta is shutting down its Horizon Workrooms virtual office software.
According to Meta’s announcement, Meta Horizon Workrooms is being discontinued as a standalone app on Feb. 16, 2026.
The company spun it as a logical step given that Meta Horizon is now a “social platform that supports a wide range of productivity apps and tools.”
Meta lays off more than 1,000 employees from metaverse division
But we believe the real reason has to do with the fact that people just don’t want to sit in virtual reality meetings.
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Launched in August 2021, the Horizon Workrooms is a virtual office that allows people to hold virtual meetings. The fact that it required users to wear an Oculus Quest headset made it impractical for many companies to have company-wide meetings this way, as well as made it more cumbersome for a lot of users.
Case in point: Meta itself gave a Quest to all of its employees for free in 2021, and they still didn’t use it very much.
The evolution of Meta’s virtual reality worlds also came with a number of challenges, at one point including the lack of lags on avatars, which made early Horizon Workrooms meetings a bit awkward.
Meta also announced it would end the sales of enterprise Quest headsets and accompanying services starting February 2026. It appears that the metaverse, from which Meta derives its name, isn’t such a great place for work after all.
The shuttering of Horizon Workrooms comes days after Meta laid off more than 1,000 employees from its metaverse division. With AI being every tech company’s main preoccupation these days, VR will have to go sit in the back of the class.
