Meta CTO Explains Why the Smart Glasses Demos Failed at Meta Connect — and It Wasn’t the Wi-Fi

Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth took to his Instagram to provide a detailed explanation of why multiple demos of Meta’s new smart glasses technology failed at Meta Connect, the company’s developer conference, this week.

On Wednesday, Meta introduced three new pairs of smart glasses:

• An upgraded version of the existing Ray-Ban Meta
• The new Meta Ray-Ban Display with a wristband controller
• The sports-focused Oakley Meta Vanguard

However, during the event, several live technology demos failed to work.

In one instance, cooking content creator Jack Mancuso asked his Ray-Ban Meta glasses for instructions on a recipe. The AI skipped ahead after repeated prompts, forcing him to stop the demo and hand it back to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, joking that the Wi-Fi might be the issue.

In another demo, the glasses failed to pick up a live WhatsApp video call between Bosworth and Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg eventually gave up, while Bosworth joked onstage about “brutal” Wi-Fi.

After the event, Bosworth explained on Instagram that the issue wasn’t the Wi-Fi but a resource management error.

“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 said.

Additionally, the way Meta routed the Live AI traffic to its development server caused the server to become overwhelmed — effectively a self-inflicted DDoS attack. The server wasn’t designed to handle the simultaneous traffic from all glasses in the building; it was only planned to manage the demo units.

The WhatsApp call failure was caused by a new bug: the smart glasses’ display had gone to sleep at the exact moment the call came in. When Zuckerberg woke the display, the notification didn’t appear due to a race condition bug, where multiple processes conflict with one another. Bosworth noted this bug was fixed after the event.

Despite the glitches, Bosworth emphasized that these were demo failures, not product failures:

“Obviously, I don’t love it, but I know the product works. I know it has the goods. So it really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure,” he said.