Yahoo! CEO fired

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Carol Bartz was fired 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. The company plans to search for a permanent replacement for Bartz.

Bartz, 63, has had a rocky tenure at Yahoo since she was appointed CEO in January 2009. Most recently, Yahoo settled a dispute surrounding a Chinese payment service called Alipay in a way that ended up diminishing Yahoo’s stake in the company.

Bartz was hired in January 2009 to engineer a turnaround after Yahoo fell further behind Internet search leader Google Inc. under its two previous CEOs, its co-founder Jerry Yang and former movie studio boss Terry Semel.

Yahoo made more money under Bartz because of layoffs, service closures and other cost-cutting moves since her arrival.

Google, though, has gotten even stronger in the past two years while Facebook, the owner of the Web’s most popular hangout, has emerged as a formidable threat that’s attracting more of the major marketing campaigns that once went to Yahoo.

The departure was first reported by the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D technology blog.

Yahoo shares jumped 74 cents, or 5.7 percent, to $13.65 in after-hours trading. That’s about 12 percent higher than they were when Bartz was named CEO.