Meta CTO explains why the smart glasses demos failed at Meta Connect — and it wasn’t the Wi-Fi

At Meta Connect, multiple demos of Meta’s new smart glasses—including an upgraded Ray-Ban Meta model and other variants—failed during live presentations, leading to visible technical difficulties. Initially attributed to Wi-Fi issues, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later clarified that the problems were due to resource management errors and a software bug. Specifically, when a cooking demo triggered the “Live AI” feature, it inadvertently activated the feature on every pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the building, overwhelming Meta’s development server and effectively causing a self-inflicted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) scenario. This overload was not anticipated during rehearsals, which involved fewer devices. The failed WhatsApp video call demo was caused by a previously unseen “race condition” bug, where the glasses’ display went to sleep just as the call arrived, preventing the incoming call notification from appearing. Bosworth emphasized that this bug was rare, has since been fixed, and does not reflect the product’s overall reliability. Despite the glitches