>"The move, described by four people involved in the effort, requires thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels. While all three services will continue operating as stand-alone apps, their underlying messaging infrastructure will be unified, the people said. Facebook is still in the early stages of the work and plans to complete it by the end of this year or in early 2020, they said."
>The effort has caused internal strife. Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, abruptly left Facebook last fall after Mr. Zuckerberg began weighing in more. WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, also departed for similar reasons. More recently, dozens of WhatsApp employees clashed with Mr. Zuckerberg >When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, Mr. Koum talked publicly about user privacy and said, “If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.” >Several WhatsApp employees have left or plan to leave because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans, the people said.
