Glitches Humiliated Zuck in Smart Glasses Launch. Meta CTO Explains What Happened (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0179415992
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/21/023248/glitches-humiliated-zuck-in-smart-glasses-launch-meta-cto-explains-what-happened
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/19/meta-cto-explains-why-the-smart-glasses-demos-failed-at-meta-connect-and-it-wasnt-the-wi-fi/
Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth later [6]explained the funny reason their demo didn't work , reports TechCrunch, while answering questions on Instagram:
> "When the chef said, 'Hey, Meta, start Live AI,' it started every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building," Bosworth explained. "That obviously didn't happen in rehearsal; we didn't have as many things," he said, referring to the number of glasses that were triggered... The second part of the failure had to do with how Meta had chosen to route the Live AI traffic to its development server to isolate it during the demo. But when it did so, it did this for everyone in the building on the access points, which included all the headsets. "So we DDoS'd ourselves, basically, with that demo," Bosworth added... Meta's dev server wasn't set up to handle the flood of traffic from the other glasses in the building — Meta was only planning for it to handle the demos alone.
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> The issue with the failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, was the result of a new bug. The smart glasses' display had gone to sleep at the exact moment the call came in, Bosworth said. When Zuckerberg woke the display back up, it didn't show the answer notification to him. The CTO said this was a "race condition" bug... "We've never run into that bug before," Bosworth noted. "That's the first time we'd ever seen it. It's fixed now, and that's a terrible, terrible place for that bug to show up." He stressed that, of course, Meta knows how to handle video calls, and the company was "bummed" about the bug showing up here... "It really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure," he said.
Thanks to Slashdot reader [7]fjo3 for sharing the news.
[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/2049228/meta-ray-ban-display-glasses-design-hud-clips-leak
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/technology/personaltech/meta-smart-glasses-mark-zuckerberg.html
[3] https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-failed-demo-meta-ray-ban-display-glasses
[4] https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968473847901880678
[5] https://x.com/TechCrunch/status/1968473437472448727
[6] https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/19/meta-cto-explains-why-the-smart-glasses-demos-failed-at-meta-connect-and-it-wasnt-the-wi-fi/
[7] https://slashdot.org/~fjo3
Demo Effect (Score:2)
It's called the "demo effect", a special-case of Murphy's Law. I have no idea how Steve Jobs was immune to it.
Re: (Score:3)
Zuck is humiliated by his own existence. Jobs had a lucky turtle-neck, not the sweater he always wore, but an actual turtle neck extracted from Mitch McConnell.
Re: (Score:1)
Apparently reality distortion field beats demo effect.
Re: (Score:2)
Jobs had it a few times, but he usually just had a backup device ready to switch over to. I recall it at least once with a Mac, and famously with I think an iPhone where be blamed the large number of WiFi devices in the room.
Re: Demo Effect (Score:2)
His reality distortion field was so strong that it's waves still last to this day. All kidding aside, I recall stuff sometimes did go wrong 15 minutes or so before the demo. That's not entirely the same though. Jobs was quite relentless, "fix it or your fired" he said, or something to that effect. And I bet he rehearsed a lot. That dude always wanted everything to be perfect. And products back then being less connected and less intelligent might also help.
Re: Demo Effect (Score:2)
"its", "you're".. *cries in shame*
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't magic what Steve Jobs did. Nobody is immune to Murphy's Law. "If anything can go wrong, it will"... the key is to reducing what can go wrong. Preparation is the key. Steve Jobs rehearsed for days in advance of major demos. In the case of the iPhone demo, he knew exactly what buttons to press in what order to avoid known bugs.
(The original link might not work, but someone copied the text of the article)
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/97jw9f/heres_the_story_of_how_steve_jobs_brilliantly/
He a
At least they tried to do it live (Score:2)
compare this with Elon's fake robots who had humans behind them doing the talking
Of course... (Score:2)
We have only his word that this is actually what happened. And, this being Facebook / Meta, they are known for lying through their teeth.
I wouldn't put it past Zuck to demand his minions make up some explanation that didn't boil down to "our tech sucks".
Is this a glitch or a feature? (Score:2)
Getting assaulted by strangers who don't appreciate glassholes wearing spy cameras in their vicinity. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks everyone has a coterie of bodyguards to protect them from violent attack.
Hey Alexa... (Score:1)
Order more dildos! The first one is something they should have thought about. I feel like we had a superbowl ad that did exactly this (not the dildos, but the mass activation). If you're going to wear a powerful computer on your face, other people shouldn't be able to give it commands. The second? You can't have a race condition with a person and a computer. I mean, you can, but *very* rarely. The odds of a real race occurring in an already failing demo seem very low and really stretch the definition
Not a Real World Issue (Score:4, Funny)
> When the chef said, 'Hey, Meta, start Live AI,' it started every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in the building.
Meta don't have anything to worry about. That can't possibly happen in the wild because it would require more than one person owning a set, and I've yet to meet anyone even considering purchasing them.
I do not like Zuck any more than the rest of you (Score:2)
but give the guy a break. This is hardly the first new product demo to have failed. Maybe they should have had the foresight to run it over a private network and not the center's WiFi, but knowing what will happen in the real world is very hard to get right.
Re: I do not like Zuck any more than the rest of y (Score:1)
Sorry but he doesn't deserve a break here. CEOs justify their excessive pay packages by claiming great powers of vision and foresight. When I'm doing any demo's I will always do a quick trial run on the infra I plan to use. He clearly didn't. What does that say. Great powers of overconfidence?
Demo failure not a product failure (Score:2)
You can't fail a demo due to a bug in the product if the product is working perfectly. He should accept the failure with more grace ala BSOD on Windows 95 when Bill Gates plugged a plug and pray printer in, rather than gaslighting everyone.