Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is relocating to the United Kingdon capital London from San Francisco, United States as the parent company Meta gears to open a fresh battlefront with Tik Tok over younger users.
The move, first reported by the Financial Times (FT), will be temporary and is planned to make London the nerve centre of Instagram's operations in the coming months.
Meta's UK hub has over 4,000 employees and is the biggest outside its San Francisco base, FT reported Tuesday.
The relocation comes at a time the company is battling a public outrage from the app's users including top celebrities over the recent changes which the tech firm is betting on to wrestle users from Chinese rival Tik Tok.
“London is already Meta’s largest engineering hub outside of the US, with over 4,000 employees across our offices, including a dedicated Instagram product team with people focused on building long-term solutions for creators,” UK publisher The Guardian quoted a Meta spokesperson.
The giant social media firm, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, last week announced the first-ever revenue fall on the back of weak advertising revenues.
The app was forced to reverse some changes to its algorithm after users complained that the platform had prioritised content from advertisers and influencers over posts from friends and family.
“I’m glad we took a risk – if we’re not failing every once in a while, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough. But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup,” Mosseri said in response to the criticism.
“We’ve learned a lot, then we come back with some sort of new idea or iteration. So we’re going to work through that.”
