For those unaware, Yahoo had previously been looking for a perfect suitor to come save the woeful tech behemoth. Verizon decided to swoop in to the rescue and pick up the search+email giant for a whopping $4.83 billion. But, ever since the news of the acquisition, Yahoo’s troubles have only increased about a thousand fold and now Verizon is reportedly pushing for a $1 billion discount on the deal.
The past couple of weeks have been the worst for Yahoo. Firstly, the company took to the interwebs to confirm that their data servers were indeed breached by state-sponsored actors(nope, it was actually cyber criminals) and over 500 million accounts have been hacked in the process.
Fast forward a week and shocking reports of Yahoo obliging to a request to run real-time surveillance on all of its e-mail accounts started surfacing the web. Though the company has obviously denied these allegations, it is believed that Marissa Mayer(alongwith general counsel Ron Bell) complied with the request from U.S intelligence officials. They instructed the engineering team to revamp the internal malware tracker to be able to track a particular ‘strings of character’ in user emails and attachments.
Due to the horrifying aforementioned reasons, NY Post reports that Verizon is pushing for a billion dollar discount in the bill pending towards acquisition of (most of) company’s assets. It says that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is quite upset with Yahoo’s misdemeanour, and the lack of disclosure before the deal. Thus, he is now asking the company to cut the price by a billion, or else he is out.
In the last day we’ve heard that Tim Armstong is getting cold feet. He’s pretty upset about the lack of disclosure and he’s saying can we get out of this or can we reduce the price?
The discount is being pushed because it feels Yahoo’s value has been diminished.
says a person with knowledge of the matter.
Verizon is currently in discussions with the Yahoo legal team over what should be the next course of action. It is pushing hard for a deep discount, but Yahoo is pressing over the fact that ‘a deal is a deal’ and there is no legal recourse to change the terms.
As we’ve been insistently saying, Verizon is now extremely nervous about the said deal, which is expected to close early next year. The final decision is still unclear at this point, but Verizon is looking for a way to not only feel better about acquiring an alleged dirty company but also reduce some monetary burdens of the deed.
