(Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
UPDATE (1/14): Multiple social media users have now posted about layoffs at Meta's Reality Labs. The posts also indicate the shutdown of three studios working on VR titles: Armature Studio, Twisted Pixel, and Sanzaru.
In a statement, Meta didn't explicitly confirm the layoffs but said that it's "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”
Original Story (1/13):
Mass tech layoffs repeatedly grabbed headlines in 2025, and early signs suggest the trend may continue this year. Meta is reportedly set to lay off hundreds of employees in its Reality Labs division.
The division currently employs around 15,000 people, and about 10% are set to lose their jobs this week, sources tell The New York Times. Reality Labs oversees the work on Meta’s AR/VR glasses, and it is led by the company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth.
The job cuts are expected to be announced at a meeting on Wednesday. According to an internal memo viewed by the Times, Bosworth has requested the presence of all staffers in person and labeled it as the “most important” meeting of the year. (Last year, Meta fired more than 20 employees for leaking similar information to the press.)
The news arrives after Bloomberg reported last month that Meta was planning to slash its metaverse budget by 30% and direct savings toward the development of Reality Labs' own AI glasses and wearables. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have been a major hit for the company, with over 2 million units sold by Q2 2025.
The metaverse, on the other hand, has failed to find its footing. Meta has reportedly lost over $70 billion on the project in the past four years. In 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was so confident about the project that he renamed the company after it.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Zuckerberg launched a new initiative to boost the company's AI infrastructure, called the Meta Compute. The goal is "to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” he said.