Skip to main content

Yahoo mulling more layoffs?

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Internet giant Yahoo is doing a bit of damage control, following reports citing anonymous sources that claimed the company was getting ready to lay off as much as 20 percent of its workforce in a move to improve its revenue profile. In a statement, Yahoo characterized the report as “misleading and inaccurate,” but stopped short of saying it’s not going to be making any layoffs. Instead, Yahoo said it is “evaluating expenses to align with the company’s financial goals.”

Initial reports of 20 percent layoffs came in the often controversial technology blog TechCrunch, which has recently been acquired by AOL. (Unconfirmed reports have AOL manuevering to finance a Yahoo takeover.) The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD blog later reported Yahoo is planning layoffs at a considerably smaller scale.

Yahoo continues to operate some of the most highly-trafficked Web destinations on the planet, and Yahoo’s search service is still second (albeit a distant second) to Google in both the U.S. and worldwide search market. However, despite Yahoo’s visibility—and high profile in online display advertising—Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been under increasing pressure to show revenue growth and pump up Yahoo’s stagnant stock price. Although Yahoo has managed to cut costs (and generate revenue) from handing back-end search operations over to Microsoft’s Bing, the company is still struggling to compete with the Google’s and Facebooks of the world, and Yahoo has also seen a spate of executives leave the company in recent months. The situation has led to rumors of private equity firms mulling a takeover of the company—with the once-mighty AOL also in the mix.

Yahoo currently has about 14,000 employees. Yahoo laid off about 2,500 employees at the end of Jerry Yang’s tenure as CEO, following the disruption of Microsoft’s abortive hostile takeover attempt of the company. More recently, Yahoo has also severed ties with employees over the sale and shutdown of services like GeoCities and HotJobs, and reports have had the company occasionally laying off small numbers of employees and engineers in various product groups, including Flickr.

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
All the ways Intel Macs are still better than Apple Silicon Macs
cheap macbook deals

MacBooks are pretty amazing these days. Thanks to the efficiency of Apple Silicon, you get all-day battery life, as well as the ability to edit videos when unplugged from power. The new MacBook Air with the M3 chip is even good enough for gaming.

All of that is in contrast to the Intel Macs of the past.

Read more
This bundle deal saves you $1,000 on an Alienware PC and monitor
An Alienware Aurora R15 gaming desktop alongside a gaming monitor on a desk.

You don't have to go through gaming PC deals and monitor deals yourself because there are bundles like this one from Dell -- the Alienware Aurora R15 gaming desktop and the Alienware 34-inch curved QD-OLED gaming monitor for a package price of $2,900, which is $1,000 less the original price of $3,900. It's still not cheap, but you'll be getting a top-of-the-line gaming rig with just one purchase. You'll have to hurry with the transaction though, as we're not sure if the bundle will still cost cheaper than usual by tomorrow.

Why you should buy the Alienware Aurora R15 gaming PC and 34-inch curved QD-OLED gaming monitor
It's the Alienware Aurora R16 that sits on top of our list of the best gaming PCs, but its predecessor, the Alienware Aurora R15, remains a worthwhile purchase because of the power that it packs. It's equipped with the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X processor, AMD Radeon RX 7900 graphics card, and 32GB of RAM that's the sweet spot for high-end gamers, according to our guide on how much RAM do you need. These specifications make it more than enough to run the best PC games without any issues. The gaming desktop also features a 1TB SSD for ample storage space, and it comes with Windows 11 Home pre-installed.

Read more
Here’s proof that Snapdragon X Elite laptops can play hit games without issue
A laptop and a camera on a table with a Qualcomm logo on the screen.

Windows laptops with Qualcomm's ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite chip are set to come this summer, but we're already getting a preview of how good the devices will be for gaming. A recent video surfaced online showing how one of the most popular PC games, Baldur's Gate 3, can run on a Qualcomm reference laptop with the chip -- and it does look to be pretty impressive.

As shared by Devin Arthur on X, Qualcomm ran this game on a sample laptop at 1080p resolution. The demo was done in a public setting, and it's not clear what else was changed beyond that, but it does appear stable, with little to no lag.

Read more