Yahoo president and CEO Carol Bartz was fired Tuesday - over the phone by chairman Roy Bostock by her own brief e-mail account- after 32 months on the job. She has been replaced for the moment by CFO Tim Morse.

Tech blogger Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, who has followed Yahoo like a shadow, broke the story, which was subsequently confirmed by the company. Morse, who will keep his day job, has been there all of three months after leaving Altera.

The company said it will hire "a nationally recognized executive search firm" to look for another miracle worker who probably doesn't exist.

Swisher remarked that "Why Yahoo's board did not name a new leader immediately is curious and might indicate a larger deal around Yahoo is in the offing....The players who have sniffed around of late are powerful, sources said, including Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners, among others."

"Also in the Wall Street rumor mill recently are large companies: AT&T, News Corp. and Verizon. All the schemes are different - ranging from taking it private to making a large investment to splitting it into parts - although they all seem to require cooperation with Yahoo to get done. And while there is no serious effort afoot as yet, there have been increasing signs of late that Yahoo's board is ready to listen to any serious offers, said multiple sources, especially as the company has continued to drift under the leadership of Bartz."

To support Morse the company means to create an "Executive Leadership Council" consisting of general counsel Michael Callahan, chief product officer Blake Irving, executive VP, Americas Ross Levinsohn, EMEA chief Rich Riley, and APAC chief Rose Tsou.

They are also supposed to do a "comprehensive strategic review."

Yahoo co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, who blew an acquisition by Microsoft for an ungodly amount of money, will also bend Morse's ear. Yang has reportedly been on the outs with Bartz lately and apparently had a hand in her ouster. According to a statement issued in Bostock's name, "The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company's leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities."

TechCrunch says the tough-talking profanity-inclined Bartz never held more than a 77% approval rating among Yahoo staff between March 2009 and March 2010 and that the number dropped to 50% this past March. Swisher described Bartz's performance as "decidedly bumpy and mostly downhill...Yahoo's recent financial results have been weak, its key advertising business is struggling, its attrition rate among engineers and others is startlingly high and its product innovation cycle seems stopped up."

Former SVP of communications Brad Garlinghouse tweeted, "Ding dong the witch is dead."

What may have broken the camel's back for the board after continuing losses to Google and Facebook was the recent impasse with Alibaba over the co-owned Alipay subsidiary, which Alibaba up and spun out to a business controlled by Alibaba CEO Jack Ma. Yahoo is Alibaba's largest investor.