Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz has been sacked by the company’s board and was replaced by CFO Tim Morse in an interim capacity.
According to Reuters, Bartz in a memo to employees said that she was fired by chairman Roy Bostock over the phone.
"I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman of the Board," she said in an email. "It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward."
The move ends a rocky two-year run marked by stagnating growth and a bitter rift with Chinese partner Alibaba.
Quoting a person close to the company, Reuters reported that the decision to sack was reached by an unanimous vote of Yahoo’s eight independent directors late last week. Bartz, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who are also on the board, did not participate in the vote.
Bartz joined Yahoo as the third CEO in three years in January 2009 after a successful stint at software giant Autodesk, with high hopes of turning around the ailing Yahoo.
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However, after two and a half years since Bartz took over, Yahoo is worth less today than it was before she started. In recent years Yahoo lost ground to Google and social network Facebook. Yahoo has been constanly losing it market share in selling online graphical and video ads to these firms.
According to comScore, the number of minutes that US website visitors spend on Yahoo sites per month has dropped 33% since Bartz took over the firm.
