Marissa Mayer to quit as boss of troubled Yahoo after $4.8bn Verizon deal

Yahoo (NasdaqGS: YHOO - news) boss Marissa Mayer is to quit the troubled tech giant if the $4.8bn (£4bn) sale of its digital services to Verizon (NYSE: VZ - news) goes ahead.

The company will also be re-named Altaba though telecoms company Verizon is expected to retain the Yahoo brand.

Under the deal, Yahoo is selling its email, websites, mobile apps and advertising tools to Verizon.

In its new guise as Altaba, it will become a holding company for investments in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (Berlin: AHLA.BE - news) and Yahoo Japan that are together worth more than $40bn (£33bn).

Chief (Taiwan OTC: 3345.TWO - news) executive Ms Mayer, co-founder David Filo and four other directors on the current 11-member board will resign after the sale to Verizon closes, the company disclosed.

But the deal has been jeopardised by Yahoo's recent discovery of two computer hacking attacks that stole personal information from more than one billion user accounts in 2013 and 2014.

Verizon is looking at whether it should renegotiate the deal in the light of the revelations and amid fears that they could trigger a backlash among Yahoo users.

Yahoo - led by Ms Mayer since July 2012 - was once an internet giant before being overtaken by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) .

But despite falling out of fashion, it still boasts hundreds of millions of users.