Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced it’s shutting down its enterprise communications business Workplace.
According to TechCrunch, the platform will continue to operate as normal until the start of September 2025, however, it will then move to read-only until May 2026, when it will be completely decommissioned.
“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 source told TechCrunch.
“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.”
The change marks the end of a 10-year run for the product, which had big plans to bring a differentiated revenue stream to Facebook, but ultimately found it too hard to compete against the likes of Slack and later Teams from Microsoft.
Workplace was originally built because of the way in which Facebook itself was using its flagship social network.
It was already running a more closed version of Facebook for its own internal teams, and the company saw an opportunity to build that out as a product to target business users.
Over time Workplace managed to pick up some very significant customers, but ultimately market share turned to Slack and Teams.
Over time several key employees building Workplace left, and the product never recovered.
“Growth slowed down” the source told TechCrunch.
“It also shows that it (Meta) is being more decisive by killing all non-core projects.”
