Yahoo Reduces Staff By 4 Percent; Hands Out Pink Slips To Over 500 Employees

After weeks of no official response from Yahoo on the rumored layoffs taking place this week, a spokesperson for Yahoo has finally confirmed that the company is issuing pink slips to employees today. Yahoo will be letting go approximately 4% of its global workforce, which adds up to around 560 employees.

Here’s the response:

Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace. We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities.

Yahoo! is grateful for the important contributions made by the employees affected by this reduction. We are offering severance packages and outplacement services to these employees.

From previous reports, Yahoo was rumored to be laying off about 5 percent of its worldwide staff of 14,100 (from October’s third quarter earning results), so it’s good news that cuts are lower than expected.

As we wrote a few hours ago, Yahoo employees have been venting about the layoffs on Twitter and via email. According to anecdotal reports, severance packages appear to be pretty generous to employees.