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Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name at the end of his 80-minute Connect keynote on 28 October 2021. His reasoning, quoted by Design Week, was that the company's brand was so tightly linked to one product that it could not represent everything it was doing, let alone its future. The Facebook app kept its name; the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, became Meta. Meta said it chose the word because it can mean beyond.

The symbol is a single continuous loop drawn as a line in space using the company's own Quest VR technology. It can read as an M or as an infinity sign, which Meta tied to infinite horizons in the metaverse. It was designed to live in motion and 3D, to be seen from different angles and to take on endless textures and colours, while a blue gradient connects it to the company's products. The wordmark uses the corporate typeface introduced in 2019.

Meta and Design Week describe the identity as designed in-house by the company's brand and product teams. Outside partners worked on the wider system; we have not found two independent reports naming them for this work.

Critics were quick. Quartz rounded up comparisons to a pretzel, a Pringle and IBM's design thinking loop, and logo trend analyst Bill Gardner said he had found nearly 1,200 logos using a similar loop, a trope he dated to 2008. Erik Spiekermann, designer of the classic typeface FF Meta, was unhappy about the name. The New York Times was more measured, quoting author Michael Evamy: it checks a lot of boxes, very simple, visible at all scales, and blue.

The Irish Times was among the harshest. Its media columnist called the symbol droopy and bafflingly bad, a Rorschach test in the tradition of Airbnb's Bélo that invited readings from a Pringle to a thyroid, and judged it far better in motion than in the static 2D form most people would actually see. She called the infinity loop daringly unoriginal, listing Webex, Visual Studio and Virgin Media among its precedents, and doubted that soft curves could distract from the company's record. Meta had said the name was chosen because it can mean beyond; the column noted it can also mean dead in Hebrew, which spawned a hashtag.

Both views are right. As a mark, it is generic. As a system for VR headsets, phones and watches, it works. The real problem was always the reputation behind it, and a loop could not fix that.