Meta CTO Explains Connect 2025 Smart‑Glasses Demo Glitches
At Meta Connect 2025, two onstage demos of the Ray‑Ban/Meta smart‑glasses went awry. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explained in an Instagram AMA that both were demo failures — not inherent product failures — and that fixes have been applied.
What happened?
- Live AI overload: During a live cooking demo, when a creator said “Hey Meta, start Live AI,” it triggered Live AI on every Ray‑Ban pair in the venue. Because Meta routed Live AI traffic to a development server to isolate it, the server ended up receiving traffic from every pair and effectively DDoS’d itself, causing the Live AI demo to glitch and skip steps.
- WhatsApp video‑call bug: When Zuckerberg tried to demonstrate taking WhatsApp video calls on the glasses, incoming call notifications appeared to the audience but he couldn’t answer. Bosworth said a previously unseen bug put the display to sleep at the instant notifications arrived; after waking, there was no option to accept the call. The issue has since been fixed.
“We DDoS’d ourselves, basically,” Bosworth said, and added that the WhatsApp bug was new and has been resolved.
Why it happened
Meta’s routing of demo traffic to a dev server, combined with a venue full of people wearing the AI‑enabled glasses, created an unexpected load. The second issue was a timing bug affecting the display that escaped testing because the number of devices during rehearsal was much lower.
What this means
Meta says these were isolated demo failures and that the features work as intended in normal conditions. Still, the episode highlights the challenge of live demos for networked devices and the importance of robust isolation and scale testing.
Official product page: Meta Ray‑Ban AI Glasses
Originally reported by Engadget; Meta CTO provided the AMA explanation. (No RSS links included.)
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