Put out your 56k modems, early internet giant Yahoo is soon to be gone forever – at least in its current form.
Having just sold most of their core business (their email hosting, their websites, their mobile apps and their advertising network) to US telecom giant Verizon, Yahoo is now changing their name to “Altaba” as part of a pivot towards becoming an investment company, which should be heartbreaking to you if you’re one of the half-a-dozen people left who use Yahoo for anything.
People were apparently thrilled with the new name:
Yahoo! is changing its name to Altaba. Perfect. I can alt-tab away from the site.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 10, 2017
ALTABA??????????????????? YEAH BECAUSE YOU’RE GONNA ALT-TAB AWAY FROM THAT SHIT. THATS MY JOKE ON IT SORRY ABOUT THE CAPS. WELL SEE YA
— jon hendren (@fart) January 10, 2017
Altaba? More like Alt+Tab ah on outta there, on account of it’s a bad website!!! But folks,
— The Mortgage Haver (@andycam_) January 10, 2017
Incredible.
Yahoo had a shit of a year in 2016, with two separate high-profile security breaches making the press, one which saw the login details of 500 million users compromised and another which saw a similar breach of one billion accounts. One billion. Like, a one with nine zeros after it. As in, roughly equivalent to one seventh of the world’s population.
In addition to the shame and embarrassment of having a few countries worth of user accounts’ login details in the hands of hackers, the security fuck ups also forced them to lower the sale price to Verizon by a not-insignificant $1 billion.
The company formerly known as Yahoo will also be saying goodbye to CEO Marissa Mayer, who came aboard four years ago to bring Yahoo back to its former glory and apparently didn’t quite succeed.
RIP Yahoo.
Source: Motherboard.
Photo: Readwrite.
