While this once seemed to be a nice ancillary offering at one point, apparently, Meta decided that an enterprise platform is not something on its future development roadmap.

Meta today confirmed that it's closing down its Workplace platform, which is sort of an enterprise version of Facebook built for internal communications, sealed off from the wider web.

Also originally announced in 2015 as "Facebook at Work", publicly launched a year later, Workplace gives all of the usual Facebook functions on an internal system, with the idea being that it can reduce the training time for internal collaboration tools, by providing professionals with the Facebook interface that they're already familiar with.
And it has been pretty popular. Workplace reached seven million paying users in 2021, up 40% year-over-year at the time. But apparently, that pace has now slowed, while Meta has also undertaken a major review of its operations, to cut costs.

And within that, Workplace is now getting cut.

Meta says:

"We are sunsetting Workplace from Meta so we can focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work. Within the next two years, we will make our Workplace customers eligible to move to Zoom's Workvivo product, Meta's sole preferred migration partner."

So if you're an international company using Workplace, you've got some time, but that's on its way out too, and one day it will be completely phased out.

So that means you have to learn a new system for internal communications. Sorry.

For Meta, one upside of the shift will be that it won't have to labour to persuade workplaces that it is safe to use and won't put jeopardy on their proprietary data-in an almost intractable impediment to more widespread uptake.

Meta had a tough time, at times, winning over enterprise customers across the line as various news headlines highlighted its past data usage issues. Now, it won't have to, nor support the framework of a separate enterprise system, freeing up its time for its other projects, according to its announcement.

The deprecation timeline of Workplace is available here at TechCrunch, which goes into read-only mode in September 2025 and eventually is discontinued sometime after May 2026.

So again, you have time, but Workplace is headed for the great Silicon Valley in the sky.

But then again, by 2026, the metaverse will be the key medium for all of our communications anyway. Right?