How to delete your Yahoo account forever

It's time to move on, follow these steps to check if your account has been hacked and/or close your Yahoo account for good.

Yahoo company sign

Yahoo has confirmed huge data breach where the company reveals that recent hack has compromised over 500 million user accounts — yes, that’s right, over a half a billion. Crazy. However, the truth is that your account may be the one that has been compromised.

This is considered one of the largest data breach that has been announced publicly. If you’ve used Yahoo in 2014, there is a good chance that your information is in the hands of hackers. 

Among the stolen information, hackers might be able to obtain names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, unencrypted security questions and answers.

If you haven’t changed your password in a long time, now it could be a good time to do so.

Has your Yahoo account been hacked?

If you’re like a lot other people, you may not use Yahoo Mail very often, so the best way to check if your account has been compromised is checking your email account and see if you have received a notification from the company.

How to close your Yahoo account

Yahoo isn’t the company that it used to be, and Verizon is not likely to turn the company around either. If you have an account with Yahoo and you don’t use it very often or you don’t want to deal with security breach problems in the future, the best course of action is to delete the account.

Yahoo actually makes it very easy to close/delete your account:

  1. Sing in to your Yahoo Mail account. Use phone verification as necessary. 

  2. Head over to the Terminating your Yahoo account page. If you use a phone number to sign in, visit this page instead.

  3. Scroll down to the end of the page, confirm your password.

  4. Click Terminate this Account.

For more information, you can also refer to this Yahoo support page

About the author

Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.