This year’s Meta Connect conference experienced several high-profile glitches during Mark Zuckerberg’s latest AI glasses live demonstrations. The (very public) mishaps followed the CEO’s bold prediction that smart glasses will become essential wearable tech, and that not wearing a pair would leave you at a “pretty significant cognitive disadvantage,” which he made during Meta’s 2Q 2025 results conference call (pdf).

A half-baked demo: During a cooking demo with content creator Jack Mancuso, Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses failed to answer basic questions about a Korean-inspired steak sauce recipe. Instead, they repeated pre-programmed instructions instead of engaging with the live queries. Another demo showing the Ray-Ban Display and the neural wristband also faltered when Zuckerberg couldn’t successfully take an incoming video call. Initially, both failures were chalked up to poor WiFi connectivity.

The real culprit? Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later revealed on Instagram that the problem actually stemmed from an unexpected challenge: dozens of Ray-Ban smart glasses in the venue responding simultaneously to the “Hey Meta” wake word. Allegedly. According to Bosworth, this created an inadvertent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on their development servers, which hadn’t been stress-tested for this scenario.

Bosworth emphasizes that these were demonstration hiccups rather than core product flaws, maintaining confidence in the technology’s capabilities under normal conditions.

Despite the risks (and collapse) of their live demos, Meta’s gaffe was well received. Meta has seen a surprising boost in consumer trust after the demo, with audiences championing the company for choosing authenticity over perfection. Instead of relying on prerecorded demonstrations — which has been the industry standard since the pandemic — Meta’s decision to do a live demo proved to be a key competitive advantage, as viewers found it (warts and all) more convincing and impressive than polished presentations.

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