The experiment with VR offices is officially winding down at Meta. The social media behemoth will shut down Horizon Workrooms on February 16, ending its standalone virtual workspace app that once represented its ambitions for a work-focused metaverse. After the shutdown, users will no longer be able to access meetings or virtual rooms, and all Workrooms data will be deleted. Launched in 2021, the app was designed to make remote work more immersive through Quest headsets.
The move comes as the Mark Zuckerberg-led company continues to scale back Reality Labs after years of heavy losses. The division has reported more than $70 billion in losses since 2021, including an operating loss of $4.4 billion in the third quarter of 2025, highlighting the widening gap between Meta’s metaverse plans and actual market demand. Just days ago, Meta moved to cut about 10% of Reality Labs’ workforce, impacting over 1,500 employees out of around 15,000, as Quest headset shipments dropped 16% year over year to 1.7 million units in the first three quarters of last year. The social media giant now appears to be far more focused on the AI race, shifting attention and resources away from its Reality Labs projects.
Horizon Workrooms was one of the earliest and most visible examples of the company’s belief that virtual reality could fundamentally change how people work. The app allowed users to attend meetings as avatars in shared virtual offices, use spatial audio to simulate real-world conversations, collaborate on whiteboards, and share screens or entire computer desktops inside VR.
However, the reality of VR at work never matched the original vision. Many companies found it hard to justify rolling out VR headsets at scale, especially for everyday meetings. Long sessions in head-mounted displays even proved uncomfortable for some users. The extra effort required to set up VR hardware also made Workrooms less practical than traditional video conferencing tools that work instantly on laptops and phones. As a result, adoption stayed limited, with most companies treating it as an experiment rather than something used in daily work.
For existing users, the end of Horizon Workrooms is final. Meta has made it clear that once the service is shut down, all associated data will be permanently removed, and there will be no direct successor app offering the same VR office experience. Teams that experimented with Workrooms will need to migrate to conventional collaboration platforms or third-party VR tools that continue to operate on Quest devices.
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