Yahoo has been laying off employees since last week in Sunnyvale, CA. Most of the layoffs are/were part of a search integration with Microsoft. Apparently some pretty high level people were let go – folks that thought they had a job for life were surprised to learn that they were let go. It is not known how many people were laid off but it is estimated to number upwards of 1000. Another source told me that engineers in the search development group in India were also let go. The layoffs in India have been  happening in small groups and that it has been happening since the beginning of the year. A different source told the San Francisco Chronicle that the people in the editorial team that does search relevance testing was also let go.

About six weeks ago many Yahoo employees were shocked to learn that 600-700 people in the Flickr team would be laidoff. Om Malik wrote then “Yahoo layoffs have started and they seem to have hit the Flickr team. Many engineers from the service have been either laid off or are leaving on their own. Rev Dan Catt, Ashot Petrosian and Neil Kandalgaonkar were amongst those who tweeted about their exits. Catt, for instance, is moving back to UK. I am told Cal Henderson, Flickr Architect – a rock star developer — has also left, though I have not been able to confirm that. His name is missing from Flickr’s About page “