Meta discovered a "never-before-seen bug" during disastrous AI glasses presentation

Today in schadenfreude: Mark Zuckerberg couldn't even pick up a call on his own $800 Ray-Bans.

By Emma Keates | September 19, 2025 | 10:11am

Screenshot: Times News/YouTube

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If you want to spend your morning watching tech execs flounder around on stage, it’s a great time to tune into the live demo of Meta’s new smart glasses. The $800 Ray-Bans use AI to display an on-lens screen that can take pictures, translate text, display walking directions, answer calls, and more. Well, that’s what it should be able to do, at least. Mark Zuckerberg and co. had a hard time actually proving it at their live demo earlier this week. TheVerge has a good rundown of the disaster on TikTok. First, Zuckerberg himself failed to pick up a WhatsApp call—over and over and over again. “Let’s go for a fourth,” he says at one point. Then, “I don’t know what to tell you guys,” when the call drops… again. It feels a little like watching one of those failed presentations from Succession.

Then, the company brought out a chef to demonstrate how the glasses could give step-by-step cooking instructions, but they went radio silent when the chef asked the simple question of what he should do first. He then just stands there awkwardly for a shockingly long time with no direction whatsoever.

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Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, did explain the technical difficulties in an AMA after the fact, per TheVerge. “When the chef said ‘hey Meta, start Live AI,’ it started every single Meta Ray-Ban’s Live AI in the building,” he said. “We had routed Live AI traffic to our dev server, in theory, to isolate it, but we had done it for everyone in that building on those access points. We DDoS’d ourselves, basically.” On stage, Zuckerberg had claimed it was the Wi-Fi.

The video call issue was “more obscure,” he said. It apparently involved a “never-before-seen bug” that occurred when the Display glasses went to sleep at the exact same moment that the device received the call notification. (Presumably this same bug happened a few times.) The bug has now been fixed, according to Bosworth, but he acknowledged that the demo was a “terrible place for that bug to show up.” Well, Meta’s loss is our gain. You can watch some of the very funny footage from the presentation below: