Two months before it changed its name to “Meta,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his metaverse for work: Horizon Workrooms, envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate. Today, the company announced it’s shutting that space down: “Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026,” reads the note tucked away on a help page.

Meta will also no longer sell its headsets and software as a service for businesses, another help page reads: “We are stopping sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial SKUs of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 2026.”

Meta just laid off roughly 10 percent of its entire Reality Labs division, over 1,000 jobs. In the aftermath, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Zuckerberg has changed his mind about what the word “metaverse” actually means. Mobile yes, smart glasses yes, but maybe not VR.

First, we learned that Meta’s layoffs had completely shuttered three of Meta’s hard-won VR game studios, after previously closing another in 2024. Soon, it came out that it’s abandoning future development on Supernatural, its standout VR fitness app, and that it has reportedly gutted the studio behind Batman: Arkham Shadow as well.

What’s next, Horizon Worlds? Maybe Meta will draw the line there, because it’s one of the few VR experiences Meta has made available on mobile phones too; Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth already said the company’s Horizon team will “double down on bringing the best Horizon experiences and AI creator tools to mobile” in a memo obtained by Bloomberg.

Bloomberg writes that “Meta will continue to develop the metaverse, but with a focus on mobile phones instead of the fully immersive VR headsets that the company initially imagined.” To be clear, the term “metaverse” was coined by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson to describe a fully immersive shared VR world, but I suppose mobile makes sense if you consider Fortnite to be a metaverse and don’t need the “fully immersive” part.

It stings for true believers in Oculus VR, though, and for those who thought more would come out of Facebook buying up all those VR game studios. But it seems the primary audience for Meta’s VR headsets are young teens and kids now, and so perhaps business-to-business VR isn’t where the resources should go.

It appears that Meta Workrooms will shut down abruptly on February 16th, to the point that “any data associated with Workrooms will be deleted.” The company recommends trying Arthur, Microsoft Teams and Zoom Workplace instead, and also writes that the Meta Quest Remote Desktop app will stick around if you want to emulate multiple virtual monitors in your headset.

For Meta Horizon managed services, the company writes that existing customers can continue to access those through January 4th, 2030, and that licenses will be free after February 16th of this year.