Report: Yahoo fires CEO Bartz

Sep 7, 2011, 0:25 GMT

San Francisco - Struggling online portal Yahoo has fired chief executive Carol Bartz, The Wall Street Journal's All Things D blog reported late Tuesday.

The company, which was one of the first internet directories but has since been eclipsed by Google, Facebook and others, did not officially announce the move.

Marketwatch quoted a person close to the board as saying that Yahoo's Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse had been named interim CEO.

The report quoted Bartz as issuing a company-wide email detailing her ouster.

'To all, I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's chairman of the board,' Bartz wrote in the email that went out late Tuesday. 'It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.'

Bartz, 63, took over the company in early 2009 amid intense shareholder resentment of founder and then-CEO Jerry Yang, who turned down a 47.5-billion-dollar buyout offer from Microsoft, months earlier.

The company is now worth about 16.25 billion dollars, according to its closing price at the end of trading Tuesday. In the aftermath of Bartz's ouster the company's shares soared over 6 per cent in after-hours trading.

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