Facebook parent Meta has announced that it’s shuttering Workplace, the company’s work-focused social network geared toward businesses. The service will operate normally until June 1, 2026, when it’ll be permanently taken offline.
The notice was posted on Facebook’s Help Center. Workplace will operate as normal until Aug. 31, 2025. Starting Sept.1, 2025, users will lose the ability to post new content, and any existing content will be read-only. On June 1, 2026, the service will shut down entirely. Companies have until then to back up their data or risk losing it for good.
Workplace will be discounted by 50% starting Sept. 1, 2024, with the discount lasting until the service is fully closed. The Workplace Help Center offers resources for people who want to back up their data before the shutdown.
“We are discontinuing Workplace from Meta so we can focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work,” a Meta spokesperson said over email. “Over the next two years, we will provide our Workplace customers the option to transition to Zoom’s Workvivo product, Meta’s only preferred migration partner.”
Workvivo is already setting up its services to receive soon-to-be former Facebook Workplace users. The company, which was acquired by Zoom in 2023, boasts similar features and a similar experience to Workplace with a social media-style UI and features that integrate directly with Zoom’s video conferencing software.
Like Facebook, for co-workers
Workplace launched in 2016, when Meta was still just Facebook, and began a fight with Slack for workplace communication dominance. Workplace offered about 90% of the typical Facebook experience except that it wasn’t linked with users’ personal Facebook account and all of their friends were their coworkers. Like Facebook, users could post on people’s walls and react to posts. At launch, there was also a one-on-one video calling feature that improved over time.
The platform accumulated over 2 million paid users by 2019 and 7 million paid subscribers by 2021. It grew to include multi-business groups and other features as well.
Watch this: Facebook’s Workplace platform readies for growing demand
Meta has been restructuring aggressively over the last two years. The company laid off over 11,000 employees in late 2022 and over 10,000 more in 2023.
Meta in the metaverse
Meta has been tooting the same horn since the 2023 layoffs. The goal is to move work-focused features to the Metaverse, meaning digital worlds in which people could gather to work, play and socialize.
Read more: Making the Metaverse
“We remain fully committed to building the future of work in the metaverse and are focusing on areas we believe will be most impactful in achieving our vision, including key use cases like Quest for Business, Remote Desktop, Events and Meetings,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.
Some such features exist already. Meta demoed Horizon Workrooms on the Oculus Quest 2 in 2021 and has hopes for mixed reality with the Meta Quest 3. The company also recently launched its Llama 3 model, which now powers Meta AI across all of the company’s social media apps.