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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has told staff in an email she was fired over the phone by the chairman of the board Carol Bartz was fired on Tuesday as Yahoo Inc’s CEO nearly three years into a tenure in which the company fell short of the turnaround she was charged with leading. The company said Bartz will be replaced by chief financial officer Timothy Morse on an interim basis. “I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board,” Bartz said in a two-sentence email to employees. “It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.” Yahoo said in a statement that Bartz had been “removed” from her role and it would begin a search for a new, permanent CEO. Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock voiced his public support in June for the CEO, a lightning rod for criticism from Wall Street, and known for her tough attitude and salty language. Shares in the company jumped more than 6% in after-hours trade to $13.72, from a close of $12.91 on the Nasdaq. The stock was trading around $12 in January 2009, when Bartz joined Yahoo, hoping to engineer a turnaround for a company then slowly ceding market share. In January 2000, near the end of the dot-com bubble, the stock traded at more than $125 a share. Yahoo remains one of the most popular destinations on the web, but the company is facing increasing competition from social networking service Facebook and continuing pressure from search leader Google Inc. The Internet company reported a slight decline in net revenue in the second quarter, as efforts to restructure its sales force caused disruptions. Research firm eMarketer has projected that Facebook would overtake Yahoo this year to collect the biggest slice of online display advertising dollars in the United States. Management and the board also came under fire after the company’s handling of its relationship with China’s Alibaba Group, in which Yahoo owns a stake of roughly 40%. The rocky relationship between the companies came to a head in May when it was revealed that Alibaba had abruptly handed Alipay – one of Alibaba’s crown jewels – to a company controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, apparently without Yahoo’s knowledge. The news of Bartz’s ouster was first reported by tech blog AllThingsD. “Carol Bartz was brought in to try to organise and streamline the company and frankly she’s been able to do that. However, Yahoo is going to need a little bit more than organisation and streamlining,” said Michael Yoshikami, CEO at fund management company YCMNET Advisors. “They are going to need a vision of what they want to be in the future. And I don’t think investors really understood what that clear vision was.” Yahoo Internet Computing Carol Bartz United States Digital media guardian.co.uk