Verizon Acquisition Of Yahoo Finally Done, 2,100 Employees To Be Purged

The deal between Verizon and Yahoo to acquire the tech firm has been going on for too long. Now it’s finally done and the executives from both sides can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, employees don’t have the same luxury as the carrier is planning on terminating as many as 2,100 jobs. This affects both Yahoo and AOL.

The move isn’t really that surprising, but it should still come as a blow to the workers who will be affected by the culling. The termination will impact about 15 percent of the workforce of the two firms combined, The Wall Street Journal reports and is meant to streamline the duties of the employees. Verizon basically wanted to avoid duplicates, which can happen during mergers.

Now, it’s worth noting that the layoffs will mostly affect office staff and workers in the lower rung of the ladder. Engineers and teams responsible for product management are likely to be retained due to their expertise. The number of employees to lose their jobs are also expected to be roughly evenly spread through both AOL and Yahoo.

Of course, this isn’t the first series of terminations that the two companies have done since the acquisition deal was begun. Since 2010, Yahoo has lost over 6,000 employees while AOL shed around 500 workers last year. Since these kinds of job cuts are just parts and parcel when it comes to mergers, no one can really say that they didn’t see it coming.

The layoffs won’t begin until everything is settled, which is expected to be on June 13th, Ars Technica notes. At that time, executives from Yahoo should have plenty to celebrate as they’ll be getting a pretty sizeable chunk of money from the deal, particularly CEO Marissa Meyer. She’ll be getting $23 million in severance packages with a hefty $187 million in stocks.