They are officially calling for a seat at the table, and they’ve brought their own chairs. And if you’re still calling this generation born between 2010 and 2025 the iPad generation, then I hate to break it to you, but you’re already obsolete. T

o the uninitiated, they look like a screen-addicted mystery. To those of us paying attention, they are the most sophisticated, commercially potent, and culturally fluent architects Africa has ever seen.

Why? Because Alphas were not born alongside the internet. They were born inside it. And by 2030, Africa will be home to one in every three Gen Alphas on the planet.

QWERTY the Dinosaur

We are witnessing the rise of a generation that writes via Siri and speech-to-text before they can even hold a pencil. With 63% of these kids navigating smartphones by age five, they don’t see a QWERTY keyboard as a tool.

They see it as a speed bump, the long route, an inefficient use of their bandwidth. They don’t need to learn how to use tech because they were born with the ability to command their entire environment with a voice note or a swipe.

They are platform agnostic by instinct. They don’t see boundaries between devices. They’ll migrate from an Android phone to a Smart TV to an iPhone without breaking their stride. To them, the hardware is invisible…it’s the experience that matters.

They recognise brand identities long before they know the alphabet. I share a home with a peak Gen Alpha, age six and a half (don’t I dare forget that half).

When she hears the ding-ding-ding-ding-ding of South Africa’s largest bank, Capitec’s POS machine, she calls it out instantly: “Mum! Someone just paid with Capitec!” It suddenly gives a whole new meaning to the theory of brand recall, in a case like this, extending it into a mental map of the financial world drawn long before Grade 2.

And it ultimately lands on this: This generation doesn’t want to just view your brand from behind a glass screen. They want to touch it, hear it, inhabit it, and remix it. If they can’t live inside your world, you’re literally just static.

The Uno Reverse card

Unlike any generation we’ve seen to date, households from Lagos to Joburg and beyond now see Alphas hold the ultimate Uno Reverse card on purchasing power. With 80% of parents admitting their kids dictate what the family buys, these Alphas are the unofficial CTOs and Procurement Officers of the home:

• The hardware veto: Parents pay the bill, but Alphas pick the ISP based on Roblox latency and YouTube 4K buffers.
• The Urban/Rural bridge: In the cities, they’re barking orders at Alexa. In rural areas, they are the ones translating tech for their families and narrowing the digital divide from the inside out.
• The death of passive: I’ll fall on my sword when I say that with this generation, the word consumer is dead. It implies they just sit there and take what you give them, when, on the contrary, it is the total opposite. Alphas are Architectural. They are not going to buy your product unless they can co-author the experience from end to end.

As this generation creeps closer and closer to our bullseye, the team here at Irvine Partners has stopped looking at Gen Alpha as a demographic and started seeing them as the new infrastructure of the African market. They are mega-precise, fast, and surgically informed.

Believe me when I say they’ve already moved into your industry and started knocking down the walls. The only question is: are you building something they actually want to live in, or are you just a FaceTime call they are about to decline?

Pay attention. Big moves are coming. The architects are here.

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 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.