The metaverse was a $70 billion failure. Except for one app.

As much as nearly all of Meta's products are part of my daily life  —  Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, even the Ray Ban smart glasses  —  I can't say that any of them make me feel more alive. Except the one that Meta just killed.

Supernatural, the Meta-owned VR fitness app, has been my constant cardio companion since 2022. For about 45 minutes each day, I slip on Meta's Quest headset and smash through shiny targets flying at me with virtual baseball bats synced to the beat of Taylor Swift, Madonna, Imagine Dragons, Eminem, Coldplay, and many others in my living room. Throughout the workout, which Supernatural calls "flow," my body drips with sweat, and my breath explodes in thunderous bursts. More than anything, I'm transported into a meditative state I haven't found in any other physical activity: reality fades away as I become one with the action.

Supernatural, however, is fading away too. Earlier this month, Meta decided to lay off its entire staff — including its effusive, cheerleading coaches — along with 1,500 other employees in Meta's Reality Labs division. Some other VR gaming studios that Meta owned got the ax too. "We're still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we hoped," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told Sources, a tech newsletter, last week. "And so you want to make sure that your investment is right-sized."

For now, the app itself isn't going anywhere. Instead, it will continue to exist as a snapshot, frozen in time with no additional workouts. But users are worried that it might start rotting away as licenses to the songs expire and workouts get pulled.

Accessing Supernatural needs ponying up for a $300 Quest and a $10 monthly subscription fee — a big reason why it never gained mainstream popularity. But it still has a passionate — and vocal — fanbase, which is punching back, even as Meta deprioritzes the metaverse to make room for all-out investment in AI.

In the app's official 113,000-member Facebook community, a relentlessly upbeat feed of sweaty selfies from silver-haired seniors and retired moms, Supernatural's unlikely connoisseurs, Meta's announcement landed like an unexpected email from HR announcing that everyone had been laid off.

"I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach," one person posted. "I feel like I'm going to puke!" wrote another. "Supernatural is my only reason to go into VR!"

"Four years of Supernatural," posted another one. "Almost every single day. I feel BETRAYED. I feel let down. I feel angry."

Many others wrote long, emotional paeans about how the workouts helped them drop the pounds, reverse diabetes, or simply get through a rough patch in life. "This is a huge loss, especially now with the state the US is in," one user wrote. "Supernatural has been the best escape from reality for me and I'm so heartbroken."

Like all successful Meta products since Zuckerberg first built Facebook in his dorm room, Supernatural was an acquisition. In 2022, when Meta sought to buy Within Unlimited, the Los Angeles-based VR startup that made Supernatural, for more than $400 million, the Federal Trade Commission tried to block the sale. Then-FTC chair Lina Khan argued that the deal would harm competition by allowing Meta to simply purchase a top player in VR fitness rather than build its own rival app. A year later, Meta prevailed. The Information, a tech news website, called the FTC's move a "head-scratcher" and a "ridiculous sideshow."

Now Khan is having an I-told-you-so moment. "This is exactly what antitrust laws are designed to prevent: a dominant platform eliminating choice by buying up the competition and then abandoning the market when corporate priorities shift," she told me in a statement. Courts and enforcers, Khan added, should learn from this cautionary tale, "especially as they evaluate Meta's acquisitions in artificial intelligence and other emerging markets."

Some of Meta's employees are also concerned. "It makes no sense to decimate studios you acquired," says a Reality Labs employee who wished to stay anonymous. "It lowers your credibility. You will have trouble buying others in the future. But Meta does this a lot and also cancels useful things." Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

Julia Meyer, a 47-year-old single mother from Texas who was once a Supernatural beta tester, tells me that after hearing the news about killing the app she had named her Roomba "Mark Suckerberg." "Roombas are not smart," Meyer says. "They suck up everything around them, and they make no distinction as to what it is they're sucking up  —  be it carpet or dirt or your pet's tail. They just consume and bumble around. And that's pretty much the view I have of Mark Zuckerberg."

"There's such a community that was built with this," says Karla Mellinger, a 64-year-old Supernatural fan from Massachusetts who bought her first Quest headset with her COVID stimulus check. "And now they're killing it, and it's a shame, because it helped a lot of people. Mark Zuckerberg can kiss my ass."

Palmer Luckey, who sold his VR company, Oculus, to Meta for $2 billion in 2014, argued that the layoffs are actually a good thing. In a long post on X, which Bosworth retweeted, Luckey argued that Meta's acquisition of gaming studios made it harder for independent developers to compete. "Change always sucks because people lose their jobs in the process," Luckey wrote, "but in a world of limited resources, Meta heavily subsidizing their own (with money, marketing, placement, etc) at the expense of core technical progress and platform stability doesn't make sense."

"I am sure that closing Supernatural made sense somewhere on a spreadsheet to some bean counter at Meta," John Hansknecht, a 62-year-old engineer from Johns Island in South Carolina, tells me. "I don't think Mark Zuckerberg even knows how many people love this program." Last week, Hansknecht started a Change.org petition to "Save Supernatural," demanding that Meta either revamp the app itself, or spin it off, so it can be "supported by community funding or subscription models." It currently has just over 7,000 signatures.

Other Supernatural superfans are taking craftier action. One user begged Zuck's would-be cage fight foe Elon Musk to buy the app from Meta. "If there were ever a product worth saving, continuing, or reimagining under leadership that values innovation, health, and long-term impact, this is it," they wrote. "This isn't just about software. It's about the health and well-being of thousands of Americans." Others asked Taylor Swift to take over.

Some users tried to start a campaign to log in to Supernatural at the same time to "crash the servers" to get Zuckerberg's attention  —  until someone pointed out that a few thousand people would be unlikely to jam a company whose platforms are used by more than three billion people every day.

What happened to Supernatural isn't supernatural: Tech companies have a storied tradition of taking a product with a small but fiercely devoted user base, deciding it's not "core," and euthanizing it with a blog post. From Google Reader in 2013 to Pebble smartwatch when it was acquired by Fitbit in 2016 to previous Meta products like Facebook Paper and the video-call device Portal, the graveyard of tech projects with avid followings put to bed after the numbers didn't justify the continued spend is vast. The details change, but the ending is always the same: the product gets "sunset," the community mourns, and the company announces it's focusing on the Next Big Thing. (Supernatural did not even get a blog post. There was no final goodbye, no last workout, no closing lap. "They didn't just pull the plug," wrote one user in a blog post. "They gave it a farewell drink with a turd in it.")

When I spoke to Lisa Messeri, an associate professor of anthropology at Yale and author of a 2024 book about VR 'In the Land of the Unreal,' I asked her a question many Supernatural users I interviewed kept asking themselves: Is it ethical when a corporation collects years of physical and emotional data from an app that functioned as a form of self-care for thousands of people, and then pulls the rug out for a pivot?

"The question is, why did we ever think that corporations were ethical in the first place?" Messeri says. For decades, the tech industry has benefited from what she calls an "endurable myth": that better technology automatically equals social progress. Messeri points to Google's original motto ,  "Don't Be Evil,"   as "the kind of grace that we gave tech companies."

Seen through that lens, the backlash against Meta over Supernatural isn't just about losing a fitness app. It's the whiplash of thousands of people realizing that something they treated as a routine, a community, and even a mental health lifeline, was never anything more than a plaything of billionaires. "Part of the anger that you're seeing "is coming from this feeling of betrayal that comes with an enduring belief in that myth," Messeri says.

Five years ago, smarting from years of backlash over Facebook's role in the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, and damaging whistleblower revelations, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company as Meta, hitching its identity to a vision of the future he called the "metaverse."

Its defining quality, Zuckerberg wrote, "will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this." Since then, Meta has sunk more than $70 billion into making Zuckerberg's vision a reality, with little to show for it. It burned nearly $20 billion in 2025 alone.

Supernatural, arguably, was the closest the company ever came to realizing it :  a truly immersive experience that made you feel like you were hanging out, laughing, and sweating to the beat of great music on the surface of the moon, or Mars, or on top of a volcano, or in the Alps, along with strangers from all over the country.

Ultimately, Meta's mission is to build value for its shareholders, Messeri says. "It's not to build the metaverse or to pioneer AI technologies. When it seemed like VR or the metaverse could do it, they happily acquired all of these companies." Now that the VR winter has set in, she added, "it just doesn't make sense for them."

Meta's new goal, Zuckerberg announced in the summer of 2025, is building "personal superintelligence" —as long as we make smart glasses with built-in cameras and microphones that can "see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day," our primary computing devices.

To help build this new vision, Meta has invested billions of dollars in building data centers across the country and hired top AI researchers and engineers from rivals such as Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Apple, among others. So far, the company has had little to show for it.

Some of Supernatural's most passionate fans aren't convinced. "I think sometimes Zuckerberg isn't great with his decision-making," Hansknecht says. "I think he's putting all his chips on the AI glasses, and I just don't see society buying into it."

Meanwhile, he's still planning to keep paying Meta for his Supernatural subscription "until the wheels fall off," he says. "I hope that my headset doesn't just become an anchor for my boat."

Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area.