Facebook will reportedly stop pushing to sell ads on WhatsApp, more than a year after its founders resigned in protest of the effort

Facebook is reportedly shelving a controversial plan to include advertisements in its WhatsApp messaging service, a new report said.

The company recently disbanded a team that explored the best ways of integrating ads onto WhatsApp, the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horowitz and Kirsten Grind reported on Thursday.

The move is a surprising about face in Facebook's efforts to monetize its various products, particularly one of its most popular services. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, and has since been searching for ways to monetize the company's 1.5 billion userbase.

And the decision comes more than 18 months after WhatsApp cofounders Brian Acton and Jan Koum left the company, along with a slew of other company executives. In a later interview with Forbes, Acton revealed that he had clashed with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg over monetizing the app, and left in protest.