Yahoo will lay off 1,000 people in the next few days

Following in the footsteps of its long-time competitors Google, Meta, and Twitter, Yahoo is the next to downsize, although not in such dramatic numbers.

On 9 February, the company announced that it will be laying off approximately 20% of its workforce, or 1,600 people - and 1,000 of those jobs will be gone by the end of this week.

The layoffs will come almost exclusively from Yahoo for Business, the company's adtech arm, which is scheduled for restructuring into a new business unit called Yahoo Advertising. That restructuring will apparently involve slashing the adtech business's headcount by almost 50%.

According to CEO Jim Lanzone, the ad business is profitable and doing very well despite steep competition and cost cuts among clients - he claimed in an interview with Fortune that the job cuts are part of a planned strategy and would have happened even at the peak of the market.

Yahoo for Business is one of the company's older products and underwent several changes over the years, but despite being a pioneer in the digital advertising market, its position steadily slipped against Google and later Meta.

So far, no other business units appear to be affected by the job cuts, and Lanzone has said that Yahoo is still hiring aggressively, with a possibility that employees who are laid off in the current exercise may be re-employed elsewhere in the company.