Yahoo is pushing back the timeline to close the $4.8 billion Verizon acquisition

Yahoo beat Wall Street's revenue and profit targets in the last three months of the year, but pushed back the timeframe for when it expects its $4.8 billion acquisition by Verizon to close.

"Given work required to meet closing conditions, the transaction is now expected to close in Q2 of 2017," Yahoo said on Monday. The company had previously said the deal would close in the first quarter of the year.

Shares of Yahoo were up about 1.3% in after hours trading on Monday.

Here are the key numbers:

Q4 Revenue (ex TAC): $960.1 million, down roughly 4% year-on-year, but above Wall Street's $908 million target.

EPS (adjusted): $0.25, above the $0.21 expected by Wall Street.

The delay to the closing of the Verizon deal adds further uncertainty to the transaction which has been thrown into turmoil following Yahoo's recent revelation that it had been the victim of several major hacking incidents. The two separate security breaches, which occurred in 2013 and 2014, affected more than a billion of its users' accounts.

Yahoo did not publicly disclose the incidents until after it had inked the merger agreement with Verizon.

Verizon has reportedly sought to renegotiate the deal for a lower price or other concessions on account of the incidents. And on Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC was investigating why it took Yahoo so long to disclose the security breaches.

Yahoo did not eleaborate on the nature of the work that has caused the transaction's close to be postponed. And the company's decision not to hold the customary post-earnings conference call with Wall Street analysts (due to what it said was the pending Verizon deal) meant that investors were left with many unanswered questions.

Still, the fact that Yahoo believes the deal is still on track to close in the first half of the year may be a relief to some investors worried that the transaction could be scrapped altogether.

Yahoo said on Monday that it is "working expeditiously to close the transaction as soon as practicable in Q2."

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