Facebook Taps Longtime Exec Adam Mosseri as Next Instagram Chief (Report)

Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head of product, will likely be appointed by Facebook the popular app’s next chief executive “in the coming days,” according to a report from The Information on Tuesday.

The news comes one day after Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced their resignation, nearly eight years after launching the company. Systrom had been the company’s CEO while Krieger was its chief technical officer.

“We’re planning on leaving Instagram to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” Systrom said in a statement on Monday. “Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.”

Also Read: Instagram Co-Founders Resign From Company

A representative for Instagram declined to comment to TheWrap on Mosseri’s potential appointment.

Mosseri is a longtime Facebook employee that worked on projects like News Feed before moving over to Instagram earlier this year. Since buying Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has largely let the pictures-and-video app operate as a standalone company under the social network’s umbrella. But that distance had been narrowed of late, with Facebook working to more closely integrate Instagram in a number of ways. And Mosseri’s recent addition to the Instagram braintrust exacerbated the growing tension by rankling its existing leadership, according to a report by TechCrunch.

Under Systrom and Krieger’s stewardship, Instagram hit 1 billion users earlier this summer.