Elliot Schrage, Facebook Inc.’s head of communications and policy, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the company.

After more than a decade at Facebook, Schrage (pictured, right, with Mark Zuckerberg) is gone. Lately he has been a lodestone at the company, where he was tasked with dealing with the image of Facebook during numerous scandals relating to the proliferation of “fake news,” Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

According to The New York Times, which spoke with people familiar with the matter, Schrage had been planning to leave for some time. The report said he had faced mounting pressure lately over how Facebook had dealt with the volley of scandals. This notion, however, was denied by a Facebook spokesperson.

In a Facebook post, Schrage not surprisingly talked about the great times he had with the company and the challenges that came with helping navigate Facebook through what at times has been a minefield of public opinion.

“Leading policy and communications for hyper growth technology companies is a joy — but it’s also intense and leaves little room for much else,” he said. He added that he’ll stay on for a while to help find a replacement.

“It’s hard to remember that joining Facebook in 2008 was considered risky and wildly speculative,” Schrage, a former Google Inc. executive, wrote in what was perhaps the most candid part of the post. “Several wise mentors counseled against abandoning the ‘certainty’ of Google’s success for the Facebook ‘fad.’ Feel free to disagree, but I believe Facebook is still in the very early years of what it will achieve.”

He joins a number of executives who have become Facebook flotsam during this last year of stormy seas. Notably, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos left, allegedly over disagreements relating to how Facebook dealt with the Russian misinformation campaign. What’s App co-founder Jan Koum also recently jumped ship over issues relating to how Facebook treated its users’ data.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and a colleague in their Google days, was complimentary toward Schrage, writing in a Facebook post: “You’ve been instrumental in building our policy and communications teams as well as pushing many of our key initiatives – including the recent publication of our community standards, data about our effectiveness enforcing those standards and the creation of an independent election commission.”

Image: Facebook