The head of Instagram has ditched working from London after a highly-publicized move across the Pond last year to return to the US — as Threads struggles to retain users.
Adam Mosseri, who oversees the Instagram-linked “Twitter killer” app, said the recent launch of Threads made working from a distant time zone too challenging.
“A year is not enough time to move a family abroad, but doing my job from BST (British Summer Time) proved unsustainable with kids who get up early, and the company and the team’s site strategy changed drastically since, so it no longer made sense to be there,” the father-of-three sons wrote in a Threads post on Monday.
It’s unclear whether Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called on Mosseri to end his London sojourn amid the growing pains at Threads, which has lost more than half of the 100 million users who downloaded the app after its July 5 launch.
Zuckerberg cheered Mosseri’s decision with a reply to his Threads post, writing: “Welcome home!” replied.
Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Mosseri, 40, moved from San Francisco last August, and reported to Facebook’s parent company’s London offices — its largest engineering hub outside of the US — to stave off mounting competition in Europe from Instagram rival TikTok.
His move raised hackles among rank-and-file workers when he and several top executives began working far from the company’s California headquarters — even as Zuckerberg urged employees to spend more time in the office after pandemic lockdowns.
Meta announced in June that most employees would have to work on-site at least three days per week beginning this fall.
In April, when Meta asked most of its London-based staff to move stateside in a shakeup that resulted from multiple rounds of layoffs, it was rumored that Mosseri would be among those who would return to the US.
“Today we land back in the US after a year living in the UK,” Mosseri shared in the Monday post.
“The plan was to get our boys some time outside the Bay Area, and we fell in love with London,” he added.
Mosseri expressed confidence that Threads would regain its initial momentum.
In an “ask me anything” question-and-answer session posted to his Instagram story on Monday, one user queried: “Are you still confident in Threads?”
“Absolutely,” Mosseri replied. “I’ve talked about how it’s a risky bet, but it’s something that we’ve committed to in the long run.”
“The first week was amazing, I think people got overly excited” he added, referencing the influx of over 100 million users that flocked to Threads within the first five days of its launch.
“Now people are overreacting to rumors, and what the team needs to do is just continue to focus on making it better every week and then slowly but surely, we’re going to make progress,” Mosseri said.
According to analytics company Similarweb, Threads ‘ daily active users plummeted to 23.6 million on July 14 after hitting a peak of 49 million on July 7.
Last week, Threads rolled out a chronological newsfeed for its users — a much-requested feature.
Users can now sort and view their app in a chronological format based on the accounts they follow or in the original, algorithmically driven “For You” feed, which features a mixture of followed and recommended accounts.