Meta shuts down Horizon Worlds as the Metaverse dream fades

The article by Charlie Lewis, published in Crikey on 23 March 2026, examines the quiet downfall of Mark Zuckerberg’s once-celebrated Metaverse project. Meta has announced that it will effectively close Horizon Worlds, its virtual reality social network that was billed as a central component of the broader Metaverse vision. This initiative, which Zuckerberg had tied closely to the future of online social interaction, struggled to gain lasting traction among users and developers. The piece draws a historical parallel between Meta’s fading virtual space and earlier experiments such as the mid-1990s platform Worlds.com — now largely abandoned digital landscapes referred to by academics as “Digital Ruins”. Such virtual worlds, once bustling with ambition and investment, tend to become empty relics when public interest moves on. Lewis suggests that while the closure marks a small symbolic win against the overhyped promises of big tech, it also represents the broader cyclical pattern of Silicon Valley — where once-dominant innovations quickly become obsolete. The piece reflects on how the Metaverse, once touted as the next inevitable step after social media, has been overshadowed by artificial intelligence as the new frontier for technological ambition. Ultimately, the article frames Horizon Worlds’ end as both a cultural footnote and a cautionary tale about tech’s unfulfilled utopias.