According to TechCrunch, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth confessed on Instagram that the fiasco began when a chef on stage said, “Hey, Meta, start Live AI.” That one phrase triggered every single Ray-Ban Meta Live AI headset in the building.

“That obviously didn’t happen in rehearsal; we didn’t have as many things,” Bosworth admitted, adding that the company had routed all traffic to its development server to isolate the demo. In practice, that meant every headset in the room hammered the same server at once. “So we DDoS’d ourselves, basically, with that demo.”

The WhatsApp call failure was down to a separate “race condition” bug. Zuckerberg’s glasses went to sleep at the exact moment the call came through, and when he woke the display back up the answer notification never appeared.

“We’ve never run into that bug before. 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,” Bosworth explained.

He insisted the company was “bummed” about the failure but that it was purely a demo issue rather than a wider product flaw. Apparently Meta does, in fact, know how to make video calls work.