Yahoo sale to Verizon delayed as data breaches investigated

Yahoo announces that its sale will be shifted into the second quarter

The sale of Yahoo to Verizon is to be delayed by at least one financial quarter, following a series of revelations about security breaches which were not disclosed at the time of Verizon's offer.

Telecoms giant Verizon agreed to buy Yahoo's core business for $4.8bn last July. Since then, however, news of two enormous breaches of users' personal data have emerged which may affect the terms of the deal.

The first of those breaches was disclosed in in August, just after the sale had been agreed, when Yahoo announced it was investigating a reported breach of 200 million user email accounts dating back to 2014. That number later climbed to 500 million users.

In October Verizon publicly warned Yahoo that it could cut the price it was willing to pay to acquire the faded dot com, or even withdraw from the deal entirely as a resulkt of the data breach.

Then in December reports of an even larger breach emerged, with reports that up to one billion user records, probably stolen in a separate incident in 2013, were being sold online.

Yesterday it was reported that the Yahoo the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) is weighing up an investigation into the two breaches and Yahoo's delay in reporting them.

Now Yahoo has said that the deal will be postponed from the first quarter of this year to the second quarter.

"Yahoo has continued to work with Verizon on integration planning for the sale of its core business," the company said in a release. "In terms of timing, Yahoo had previously stated that it expected to close the transaction in Q1. However, given work required to meet closing conditions, the transaction is now expected to close in Q2 of 2017. The company is working expeditiously to close the transaction as soon as practicable in Q2."

Verizon has yet to comment in public.

In the original deal Verizon agreed to to buy the core Yahoo Web portal business for $4.83bn with employee stock costs estimated at at $1.1bn, bringing the total cost closer to $6bn. The deal excludes Yahoo's 15 per cent stake in Alibaba Group and its 35 per cent stake in Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo will change its name to Altaba after selling its core Yahoo web portal operations to Verizon. CEO Marissa Mayer, one of the highest paid CEOs in the S&P 500 index of the biggest companies in the US, will leave the company, walking away with an estimated $55m as a pay-off.