Yahoo Fires CEO Carol Bartz ... Over the Phone

Yahoo's high-profile CEO is gone, and it doesn't sound like a happy split. "I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board," Carol Bartz wrote in a company email today, according to the AllThingsD blog. After 30 months of lackluster results, Chairman Roy Bostock and co-founder Jerry Yang apparently had enough. They did not name a permanent replacement.

Bartz's reign at Yahoo has been "mostly downhill," writes Kara Swisher, noting that the company has been relatively weak in terms of financial results, advertising, and innovation of late. Still, the Yahoo brand (and impressive traffic) has several deep-pocketed investors and equity firms interested in striking some kind of deal, she writes. Yahoo shares were up 6% in after-hours trading, notes MarketWatch. (More Carol Bartz stories.)