Yahoo confirmed that it has laid off 600 people, following news reports often based on Twitter messages from employees who had been let go.
The layoffs amount to about four per cent of the company's global workforce, Yahoo said. "Today's personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace. We'll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities," it said in a statement.
The company said affected workers are receiving severance packages and outplacement services.
Yahoo has continued to struggle following a failed acquisition attempt by Microsoft that ultimately resulted in founder Jerry Yang stepping down from his post as CEO. Yahoo and Microsoft later signed a deal whereby Microsoft is powering Yahoo's search and Yahoo is using Microsoft's AdCenter platform. The deal has not yet helped Yahoo turn around its lagging growth.
Laid-off workers may find some comfort on Twitter, where they are receiving an outpouring of goodwill. One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters.
Plenty of companies are reaching out to the laid-off workers encouraging them to apply for jobs. People with companies including Aprendi Learning, Tucows.com, DirecTV, Combine Couture, OMGPOP.com and Uptake.com all posted Twitter messages expressing interest in hiring former Yahoo employees.
The website Quora is hosting a thread for companies in the San Francisco area interested in hiring laid-off Yahoo workers. So far, there are 14 posts about jobs with companies including Yammer, Mozilla and Cloudera.
Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com
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