If you cringed watching the recent high-profile demo of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, you weren’t alone. The live demonstration, featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was plagued by awkward and noticeable glitches that left many wondering what went wrong.
Now, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, has provided a transparent, in-depth explanation of the two technical failures. Dispelling rumors of a simple Wi-Fi issue, Bosworth revealed that the demo was derailed by an accidental server attack and a brand-new, never-before-seen bug.
Glitch #1: The Live AI Fail Was an Accidental “Self-DDoS Attack”
The first major issue occurred when a chef on stage attempted to activate the “Live AI” feature on his glasses. The system became unresponsive, leading many to assume the venue’s Wi-Fi was to blame. According to Bosworth, the real cause was a two-part failure in resource management.
- Mass Activation: When the chef said, “Hey, Meta, start Live AI,” the command didn’t just activate his glasses. It triggered every single pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses worn by the large number of employees in the building.
- Server Overload: To isolate the demo, Meta had routed all Live AI traffic to a specific development server. However, this server was only configured to handle the handful of devices used in the demo, not the sudden flood of requests from every device in the audience.
The result was a classic server overload. “So we DDoS’d ourselves, basically,” Bosworth explained. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a server is overwhelmed by a massive volume of traffic, and in this case, Meta accidentally created the perfect conditions for one.
Glitch #2: The Missed WhatsApp Call Was a “Terrible” New Bug
The second glitch happened when Mark Zuckerberg was meant to receive a WhatsApp video call on the smart glasses’ display. The call came through, but the notification to answer it never appeared, leaving him unable to interact with it.
Bosworth revealed that this was the result of a “terrible, terrible” bug they had never encountered before. He described it as a “race condition” bug.
What is a “Race Condition” Bug?
A “race condition” occurs when the outcome of a process depends on the unpredictable timing of two or more separate operations trying to access the same resource. In this case, the glasses’ display went to sleep at the exact moment the call came in. When Zuckerberg woke the display, the two processes (waking the display and showing the notification) conflicted in a way that caused the notification to fail.
“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.”
“A Demo Fail, Not a Product Failure”: Meta’s Outlook
Despite the high-profile issues, Bosworth remains confident in the product itself. He stressed that while the demo’s failure was embarrassing, it didn’t reflect the real-world performance or capabilities of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
“Obviously, I don’t love it, but I know the product works. I know it has the goods,” he said. “So it really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure.”
