Meta Lays Offs 1500 Employees from Reality Labs Division

Latest reports indicate that Meta is laying off close to 1500 employees from its Reality Labs division, as part of a plan to redirect resources from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and phone features.

The cuts are expected to hit roughly 10% of employees within the Reality Labs group, which has about 15,000 workers, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.

As part of the reduction, Meta is pivoting its metaverse efforts to focus on mobile devices, according to Bosworth’s memo. The company is also planning to cut back on its virtual reality investments to make the business “more sustainable,” according to an internal post from Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth.

“We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from metaverse toward wearables,” a company spokesperson said. “This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”

Reality Labs houses Meta’s hardware and other futuristic product efforts, including VR headsets, AI glasses and virtual world products. But Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021 because many of the investments aren’t yet generating meaningful revenue.

The metaverse — a virtual world where people can work, play and exercise — has been a particularly costly endeavor. Meta spent heavily to develop high-end VR headsets and digital features, like avatars, in preparation for heated competition with other tech firms. That rivalry never materialized, and the metaverse hasn’t taken off in the way that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg envisioned when he renamed the company Meta from Facebook in 2021.