June 23 (Bloomberg) -- News Corp.’s MySpace social- networking unit, which last week fired almost 30 percent of its staff in the U.S., today said it will cut two-thirds of its international workforce and close at least four offices.

MySpace’s international workforce outside the U.S. will shrink to 150 from 450 and London, Berlin, and Sydney will become the primary regional hubs, the company said in an e- mailed statement today.

The offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden and Spain will be reviewed and may be closed, the company said. MySpace China, a locally owned company, and MySpace’s joint venture in Japan won’t be affected.

MySpace is cutting costs to save money in response to falling advertising sales and gains by larger rival Facebook Inc. “It was clear that internationally, just as in the U.S., MySpace’s staffing had become too big and cumbersome to be sustainable in current market conditions,” Chief Executive Officer Owen Van Natta said in the statement today.

News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch is retooling his Internet operation to regain momentum. The $580 million purchase of MySpace in October 2005 looked shrewd the next year when Google Inc. signed a $900 million accord to sell ads on the site. Facing the expiration of that deal and gains by Facebook, Murdoch, 78, hired former AOL chief Jonathan Miller in April to overhaul the digital operation.

The job cuts in the U.S. and the company’s international operations come a year after another effort to fix MySpace. Fox Interactive missed its goal of $1 billion in revenue in the year ended in June 2008, leading News Corp. to reorganize operations and raising questions from analysts about the unit’s prospects.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, has 850 employees. The company, already the social-networking leader worldwide with 307.1 million users, surpassed MySpace in the U.S. last month, reaching 70.28 million, according to ComScore Inc. MySpace had 126.9 million users globally, including 70.26 million in the U.S.

To contact the reporters on this story: Simon Thiel in London at sthiel1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 23, 2009 06:33 EDT