Glitches Humiliated Zuck in Smart Glasses Launch. Meta CTO Explains What Happened

When Meta finally unveiled its newest smart glasses, CEO Mark Zuckerberg 'drew more snickers than applause,' wrote the New York Times. (Mashable points out a video call failing onstage followed by an unsuccessful recipe demonstration.)

Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth later explained the funny reason their demo didn't work, reports TechCrunch, while answering questions on Instagram:

'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 explained. 'That obviously didn't happen in rehearsal; we didn't have as many things,' he said, referring to the number of glasses that were triggered... The second part of the failure had to do with how Meta had chosen to route the Live AI traffic to its development server to isolate it during the demo. But when it did so, it did this for everyone in the building on the access points, which included all the headsets. 'So we DDoS'd ourselves, basically, with that demo,' Bosworth added... Meta's dev server wasn't set up to handle the flood of traffic from the other glasses in the building — Meta was only planning for it to handle the demos alone.

The issue with the failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, was the result of a new bug. The smart glasses' display had gone to sleep at the exact moment the call came in, Bosworth said. When Zuckerberg woke the display back up, it didn't show the answer notification to him. The CTO said this was a 'race condition' bug... 'We've never run into that bug before,' Bosworth noted. '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.' He stressed that, of course, Meta knows how to handle video calls, and the company was 'bummed' about the bug showing up here... 'It really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure,' he said.

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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