Facebook’s parent company Meta will be ending an important chapter in the social network’s history today, but the social network had lofty goals to become a major force in corporate productivity and communication.
According to information obtained by TechCrunch, Meta is closing Workplace, a Facebook version designed to facilitate collaboration between corporate teams and larger organizations.
Although we have contacted the corporation for comment, our sources inform us that an official statement is scheduled for later today. According to the sources, operations on the platform will continue unabated until the beginning of September 2025 (more precisely, August 25).
It will then remain read-only till May 2026. After then, the given service will be shut off entirely. In a note to Workplace users, the company suggests Workvivo, owned by Zoom, as a migration-ready substitute.
Workers Affected By Shutdown
Zoom purchased Workvivo, another enterprise communication tool, in 2023. The entire Meta memo is available below. The number of workers that will be affected by the shutdown is unknown at this time.
The platform, which had high hopes of providing Facebook with a unique revenue source, has now ended its ten-year existence. It was simply too difficult to compete with Microsoft Teams and Slack, among other competitors.
This is not shocking in the slightest, because the division seemed to be operating in a somewhat ambiguous strategic capacity for some time. We had even heard that after Covid, outside investment groups had approached Meta to prolong the division into a separate business that would thereafter attract outside funding.
Corporation Is Shifting Its Objectives
According to an insider, Facebook viewed the workplaces as a “strategic asset,” which is the main reason Meta rejected it. That wasn’t because Workplace brings in nearly as much money from sales as Meta does from its advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
Rather, it was done because it was crucial to give the market a more varied representation. Additionally, it assisted Meta in persuading other interested parties about the variety of services it provided.
In order to prove the regulators that Facebook was more than simply an all-encompassing social network and that businesses could benefit from Facebook’s services beyond merely purchasing advertisements.
According to the source, “it assists Facebook [and Meta] present itself like an adult.” It’s obvious that the corporation is shifting its objectives to concentrate on AI, which may eventually require additional reorganizations.
Its Main Social Network
The basic concept for Workplace came from Facebook’s own use of its main social network. The company saw a chance to develop the more restricted version of Facebook it was already using for internal teams into a platform aimed at business users.
Under the working name Facebook @ Work, it was developed by a team led by Lars Rasmussen, the head of engineering at Facebook and also known to be a co-creator of Google Maps. The team was located in London. (This was his baby; he had long intended to develop a business service on Facebook.)
An Opportunity
When Facebook identified an opportunity to give users more productivity hooks centered around communication, the product eventually came out of beta as Workplace and went on to build several third-party integrations. The workplace was able to acquire several extremely important clients over time, but eventually things took an unforeseen turn for the worse.
Teams was developed by Microsoft as a result of Slack’s enormous popularity and viral success. Although Workplace first tried to compete with them, it finally gave up and teamed up with teams for some features. Workplace’s founding team lost several important members over time, and according to a source, the product never fully recovered from Covid.