The decision follows years of heavy spending on virtual reality. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which builds VR headsets and smart glasses, has lost nearly $80 billion since 2020.

Last month, the company cut about 1,500 jobs in the unit, roughly 10% of its workforce. It also closed several VR game studios.

Supernatural, the VR fitness app Meta bought in 2023, will stop producing new content and move into maintenance mode.

Horizon Worlds launched in 2021 as a virtual reality social platform. It later expanded to the web and mobile. Now the company is narrowing its focus.

“To truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile,” Samantha Ryan, vice president of Content at Reality Labs, wrote.

In shifting to mobile, Meta is placing Horizon Worlds in more direct competition with platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite, which already reach large audiences on phones.

Ryan said, “We’re in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world’s biggest social networks. You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it’s our main focus.”

At the same time, the company said it is not leaving virtual reality hardware. Ryan added, “We have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures.”

Meta said it will clearly separate its Quest VR platform from Horizon Worlds so each can grow independently. It plans to concentrate its VR focus on supporting third-party developers rather than expanding its own first-party studios.

According to the company, 86% of the time people spend in their VR headsets goes to third-party apps.

In 2025, Meta invested nearly $150 million in VR developer programmes, including its Start Developer Competition. It reported that in-app purchases on Quest rose 13% year on year.

Meta Horizon+ passed one million active subscribers in 2025 and now offers more than 100 games.

However, company executives admit the wider VR market has grown more slowly than expected. During last month’s earnings call, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said, “It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.”

He added that sales of Meta’s glasses tripled over the past year and described them as “some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history.”

Internally, Meta has also adjusted how developers publish and sell content. It will remove individual worlds from the VR store shelves and separate worlds from the mobile app store listing.

The company said this should increase visibility for apps. It has introduced tools such as season passes, featured bundles and a “Deals” tab to improve sales and discovery.

On mobile, Meta reported growth in creator activity, noting that mobile-only worlds increased from zero to more than 2,000 in 2025. Four creators have earned more than $1 million in lifetime revenue, while nearly 100 earned six figures last year.

Meta is now putting most of its focus into building Horizon Worlds for phones while keeping its VR hardware plans in place. The company said it will do fewer projects at once and concentrate on areas it believes can grow faster.

The post Meta Shifts Horizon Worlds to Mobile as Reality Labs Losses Near $80 Billion appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

The outage, which originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 region, began in the early hours of Monday and quickly spread beyond the United States, affecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

According to AWS’s own status dashboard, multiple services are currently “impacted” due to “increased error rates and latencies,” with engineers “actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause.”

For users, the impact has been immediate and widespread. Alexa devices have gone silent, unable to respond to voice commands or execute daily routines like alarms and reminders. 

Developers and businesses using AWS’s cloud network, from Airtable to Perplexity AI and the McDonald’s app, have also been hit. Even high-traffic entertainment platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Rainbow Six Siege are offline.

Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, has logged over 2,000 incident reports in the U.S. alone since the outage began. On Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), frustrated users across time zones have shared screenshots of failed connections and frozen dashboards.

“Perplexity is down right now,” confirmed Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, in a post on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”

Amazon, in its latest public update at 3:51 a.m. ET, noted that it would provide further information every 45 minutes “or sooner if we have additional information to share.” However, at the time of writing, there is still no estimated timeline for full restoration.

This isn’t the first time AWS’s US-EAST-1 region has been the source of widespread disruption. Similar outages in December 2021, November 2020, and June 2023 took down high-profile platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Slack, Zoom, and Twitch. 

Each incident revealed an issue across the tech industry, that a large portion of the global internet depends heavily on a single cloud provider’s regional infrastructure.

The current outage appears to have hit both consumer-facing apps and backend systems, including AWS’s own Support Center and Support API, which organisations rely on for case creation and troubleshooting.

While AWS has reiterated that engineers are investigating the problem, the lack of transparency about the specific cause of the outage is driving industry-wide anxiety. Many are now revisiting familiar cases of how much centralisation is too much when the internet’s backbone depends on just a handful of companies.

For now, millions of users are in a holding pattern, waiting, refreshing, and hoping their devices come back online soon.

The post AWS Outage Knocks Out Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, Coinbase, and Canva Worldwide appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Epic Games, the studio behind Fortnite, confirmed that Apple is blocking the app from being listed or updated on iPhones, both through the U.S. App Store and its own game store recently launched in the EU.

Just weeks after Epic secured a legal win that prevents Apple from forcing developers to use its in-app payment system, previously subject to a steep 30% commission, Apple is now refusing to approve new versions of Fortnite for iOS devices.

It’s a big counter, considering the regulatory spotlight currently fixed on Big Tech’s gatekeeping.

Epic tried to resubmit Fortnite to the U.S. App Store on May 9, 2025. Apple did nothing for a week. No approval, no rejection, no explanation. For Epic, that’s a problem. 

The company runs a weekly update cycle for Fortnite, pushing out fresh content simultaneously across all platforms. A delay on one platform disrupts the whole chain. So, Epic pulled the submission and resubmitted a newer version on May 14.

By Friday morning, Epic had seen enough. “Now, sadly, Fortnite on iOS will be offline worldwide until Apple unblocks it,” the official Fortnite account posted on X. 

Apple’s silence isn’t just a delay, but a blockade. The tech giant has said nothing, and Epic hasn’t offered details about the exact cause either. 

The two firms have been having legal issues since 2020, when Epic accused Apple of anti-competitive behaviour. That fight has now spilled across jurisdictions, dragging in U.S. courts and European regulators under the Digital Markets Act.

It’s worth noting that Apple only let Fortnite back into the App Store in 2023, after EU pressure. They also approved Epic’s own app marketplace for iPhones and iPads in the bloc. But goodwill appears to have evaporated.

Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, has long spoken about Apple’s control over iOS. His issue this time centres on the company’s need for timely updates. Without them, Epic says, players are left behind, and the Fortnite experience collapses across platforms.

As of now, users across all regions are cut off. No updates, no new installs, and no timeline for when or if Apple will reverse its decision.

The post Apple Reportedly Blocks Fortnite Again, Leaving Players Worldwide in Limbo appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

The tech giant plans to present its case before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, seeking to overturn a jury verdict and subsequent judicial order that found its Play Store operations violated antitrust laws.

In 2020, Epic Games, the developer behind “Fortnite,” filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company monopolised app distribution and in-app payment systems on Android devices. 

A San Francisco jury sided with Epic in 2023, concluding that Google’s techniques unlawfully suppressed competition. Following the verdict, U.S. District Judge James Donato instructed Google to implement measures to enhance competition. 

These measures include permitting users to download alternative app stores through the Play Store and ensuring that Play’s app catalogue is accessible to competitors. The enforcement of this order is currently suspended pending the outcome of Google’s appeal.

Google contends that the trial court committed legal errors that unfairly advantaged Epic Games. The company argues that its Play Store faces strong competition from Apple’s App Store and that the court improperly allowed Epic to assert that Google and Apple do not compete in app distribution and in-app payments. 

Added to this, Google challenges the nationwide scope of the judge’s order, asserting that it oversteps by imposing broad product design mandates.

Epic Games maintains that Google’s activities represent a “years-long strategy to suppress competition among app stores and payment solutions.”

The company says it is committed to ensuring that the jury’s verdict and the court’s injunction are upheld, holding Google accountable for its anti-competitive behaviour.

The case has garnered support for Epic from entities, including Microsoft, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, all of which have filed briefs backing Epic’s position. A decision from the 9th Circuit is anticipated later this year, with the possibility of further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Recently, Google appealed a record €4.3 billion fine imposed by the European Union for antitrust violations related to its Android operating system. Google argues that the penalty unjustly punishes its innovation and has requested that the Court of Justice of the European Union overturn the fine. 

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