Meta Connect Demos Plagued by Self-Inflicted Tech Issues, CTO Reveals
SAN FRANCISCO – Meta’s highly anticipated smart glasses demos at its Connect conference last week weren’t felled by a simple Wi-Fi problem, but by a cascade of internal errors, according to Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth. The issues, which included a widespread activation of Live AI on Ray-Ban Meta glasses and a failed WhatsApp call during Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation, were the result of misconfigured traffic routing and a previously unseen software bug.
bosworth explained that the Live AI demonstration went awry when a command to activate the feature triggered all Ray-Ban Meta glasses within the building. “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,” he said. This unexpected surge in activity, compounded by a decision to route Live AI traffic through a progress server to isolate it, effectively resulted in a denial-of-service attack against Meta’s own infrastructure. “So we DDoS’d ourselves,basically,with that demo,” Bosworth added,explaining the server wasn’t equipped to handle the unexpected volume.
The failed WhatsApp call, simultaneously occurring, stemmed from a “race condition” bug where the glasses’ display went to sleep just as the call arrived. When Zuckerberg re-activated the display, the incoming call notification hadn’t yet appeared. “We’ve never run into that bug before,” Bosworth stated. “That’s the first time we’d ever seen it. It’s fixed now,and that’s a terrible,terrible place for that bug to show up.”
Despite the embarrassing glitches, Bosworth remains confident in the product. “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.
