Meta Just Killed the Metaverse It Renamed the Entire Company For

On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stood in front of a camera and told the world that the future of human connection was the metaverse. He was so certain of this that he renamed a $900 billion company after it. Not a product line. Not a division. The entire company. Facebook — the company that owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and the social graphs of three billion people — became Meta Platforms, Inc. Yesterday, Meta announced that Horizon Worlds, the flagship VR metaverse application that justified that rebrand, will be removed from Quest headsets on June 15th, 2026. Let that sink in. The most expensive corporate vanity project in the history of technology is being killed not with a dramatic announcement, not with a mea culpa, not even with a blog post from Zuckerberg himself. It's being killed with a support article titled "Updates to Your Meta Quest Experience in 2026," written by MetaStoreHelp, posted on a community forum. That's how the metaverse dies. Not with a bang, but with a FAQ.