Instagram is dissolving its Global Community Team, which worked to build deep ties with photographers and promote the service around the world, The Verge has learned. As part of a reorganization at the company, about 12 jobs currently located in cities around the world will be eliminated, with affected employees being offered jobs elsewhere at Instagram or at its parent company, Facebook.

The move was designed to eliminate duplicate efforts among some members of the team and consolidate the company’s marketing and communications efforts into a single team headquartered in Menlo Park, a former employee said.

“Focusing on our community is at the heart of everyone’s work at Instagram,” Instagram spokesman Gabe Madway told The Verge. “We recently integrated the Community group into the broader Outreach organization to better support our growing Instagram community this year and beyond. There were a small number of people affected by the change who didn’t make the move into other departments and our priority is helping them find other roles at Instagram or other parts of the Facebook family. Both companies are growing and have many job openings.”

Instagram’s community efforts date back nearly to its founding 2010, when fans of the app would visit the company’s small office in San Francisco and go on photo walks with its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Community managers began organizing “InstaMeets” around the world to bring users together, and highlighted the best of their photography on corporate marketing channels.

Instagram’s aggressive efforts to cultivate its community early on, particularly among high-end photographers, helped to set it apart from rivals in its early days, generating both brand loyalty and free promotion. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in March 2012.

Instagram’s aggressive efforts to cultivate its community early on helped to set it apart from rivals

Eventually, Instagram built a worldwide Global Community Team. In addition to hosting regular meetups and other marketing events, the team created local accounts in Russia, Japan, France, German, Spain, and Brazil. Community managers created posts in the language of the countries where they lived. The team took pride in the fact that 80 percent of Instagram accounts were located outside the United States, and informally called themselves “Team 80%.”

Community managers posted three times daily in an operation that felt like a global newsroom, according to one former employee. Collectively, the accounts have nearly 40 million followers, with each photo receiving thousands of likes and comments. But the accounts all went dark between February 12th and February 15th, and haven’t posted since. They will be phased out, with Instagram focusing all of its marketing efforts on the primary corporate account.

One former Instagram employee said Instagram’s community efforts had declined in recent years, with the “Community First” slogan that appeared on the company’s branded swag gradually replaced by a business-first mentality. “More recently, we‘d have every post analyzed for the percentage of followers who liked it, and other various engagement indicators recorded across weeks, months and years,” a former employe said. “If targets weren’t met, bonuses weren’t paid. It went from being a fun team to an aggressive-growth-driven team that obsessed over spreadsheets.”

An Instagram spokesman denied that people were denied bonuses for failing to hit performance targets.

“It went from being a fun team to an aggressive-growth-driven team.”

Other tensions in the team also emerged. After hearing constant complaints from people in their countries, a group of community managers argued forcefully that Instagram should give users the option of seeing their posts in chronological order. But their request was rejected, creating the perception that community feedback was less important to the company than it had been before.

“That wasn’t the case before Facebook took over,” the former employee said. “Community was valued and deeply understood by the original employees. Now that’s been diluted to the point of losing what made the app such a joy in the first place.”