Yahoo and Verizon 'near to agreeing revised sale terms'

Internet group Yahoo has reportedly agreed a price cut on its initial $4.8bn (£3.86bn) sale to Verizon.

Verizon's purchase of Yahoo's core internet arm was put in doubt last year after disclosure of two cyber attacks.

Several reports in the US said Yahoo has now accepted a price cut of up to $350m and agreed to share liability with Verizon for potential lawsuits.

News of the renegotiated terms was first reported by Bloomberg, which said an announcement could come this week.

Verizon wants to combine Yahoo's search, email and messenger assets, as well as advertising technology tools, with its AOL unit. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 for $4.4bn.

Verizon sees mobile video and advertising as new sources of revenue outside an overcrowded US telecoms market.

One of the original early internet search providers, Yahoo admitted in December 2016 it had been hit by a large cyber attack in 2013 which affected more than a billion customer accounts.

Yahoo had already admitted another breach in 2014 that had affected around half a billion users.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into whether Yahoo should have disclosed the breaches sooner, according to a report last month in the Wall Street Journal.

On Wednesday, Yahoo sent a warning to users whose accounts may have potentially been accessed by hackers between 2015 and 2016, as part of a data security issue related to the breach it disclosed in December. Yahoo did not say how many users may have been affected.

Since the hacking revelations last year, Yahoo has focused on trying to restore confidence in its key search business.

But latest financial results showed a fall in search revenue of 6% in the final quarter of 2016.

However, revenue from other parts of the business - the mobile, video, and social advertising units - grew more strongly.