Meta explains how its 'next big thing' fell flat on its face in front of everyone

The MetaConnect 2025 keynote conducted on Wednesday gained quite a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons, as multiple demos failed in front of live audiences. Now, Meta's chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, has explained what happened behind the scenes to cause the failures.

For those who haven't seen the video circulating online, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to make a WhatsApp video call with Meta's next-generation AI glasses on stage, but was unable to due to a bug. Zuckerberg said, "This, uh... it happens." Adding, "Let's try it again. I keep messing this up."

That wasn't the only demo that failed during the event; another involved content creator and chef Jack Mancuso, who asked Meta AI to help him make a steak sauce out of the ingredients he had in front of him. Meta AI went off script and was unable to fulfill the request. "You already combined the base ingredients," the AI told Mancuso, who was looking at an empty bowl and a table full of ingredients.

Now, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, has explained the failures of the demos in a recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Instagram, which can be viewed here. Bosworth states it wasn't a failure of the product itself, but more so a demo failure. Bosworth says that when Mancuso said, "'Hey Meta, start Live AI,' it started every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in the building," and since every single pair of Meta glasses was connected to the same developer server it crashed the server. Essentially, "We DDoS'd ourselves, basically," said Bosworth.

The Meta CTO also explained the failure with Zuckerberg's demo, saying that a "never-before-seen bug" presented itself during the demo. "The display had gone to sleep at the very instant the notification had come in that a call was coming." Bosworth added, "So even when Mark woke the display back up we didn't show the answer notification to him. We have never run into that bug before."