It’s been a few months of “will-they-won’t-they?” with everyone (okay, some people) wondering whether or not Verizon will go through with the $4.8 billion deal to buy Yahoo after not one, but two massive email breaches. Now, a Verizon executive is admitting that the company isn’t sure what’s going to happen.
After Yahoo’s recent disclosure that one billion users had been affected by the latest breach, Verizon was prompted to ask for better terms for the deal, Reuters reports, but the future of the deal still unclear.
“I can’t sit here today and say with confidence one way or another because we still don’t know,” Marni Walden, president of product innovation and new businesses at Verizon, said at the Citi 2017 Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas.
She added that the merits of the deal still make sense, and that the investigation into the breaches hasn’t been completed yet. Though there’s no timeline set for when everything will be sorted out, Verizon is ready to get this thing over with, make no mistake about that.
“We think it will take weeks at least, we don’t have a desire to have it drag on forever, that’s not our intent,” Walden said.
In the meantime, America Online CEO Tim Armstrong seems confident, however, saying he believes the purchase will happen eventually. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion on 2015.
“The hacking news that came out of Yahoo … is something that Verizon and the general counsel of Verizon is dealing directly with Yahoo on,” Armstrong told CNBC. “I remain hopeful the deal will close and I think we’ll see what the outcomes are of the Yahoo investigations in the meantime.”
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