Facebook Chief Financial Officer Departs: Has The Economy Finally Caught Up With Them?

Facebook, the popular social networking sites with millions of users in the world has one less employee. Gideon Yu, who has worked for Facebook for the past 3 years has ran out the door. This means that Facebook will be looking for a new chief financial officer within the coming days.

Mr. Yu has a long and detailed resume, playing a similar role of chief financial officer to Youtube before Google took over. He’s also worked for thriving companies such as Yahoo, and Walt Disney. More recently in his career Yu signed with Facebook in 2007, presumably raising about $15 billion dollars for the company.

Rumors speculate that the reasoning behind him leaving was that of the economy and the financial difficulties it has caused for not only Facebook but other online companies as well. Today, Facebook sent the letter below to TechCrunch:

Facebook confirms that CFO Gideon Yu will be leaving the company. Gideon has played an important role in helping us achieve our financial success, building a strong finance team and establishing the core financial operations of our company. We are grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish. Despite the poor economic climate, we are pleased that our financial performance is strong and we are well positioned for the next stage of our growth. We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience.

This leaves the question of the stability of Facebook’s management team. Over the past year there have been an increasing amount of employees at Facebook departing along with concerned investors worried about the welfare of Facebook’s stock.

Facebook hasn’t said whether the down turning economy has had a significant effect on the finances of their company. However there are a number of sources that state they are making an estimated $400 million dollars annually.