Yahoo lost another two influential executives yesterday as the company continued to lurch from crisis to crisis following the board"s decision to reject Microsoft"s $47bn (£24bn) takeover bid.

The latest departures include the Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and Brad Garlinghouse, the search division"s senior vice-president who wrote the infamous "peanut butter manifesto" that criticised the internet firm"s strategy.

Schachter"s social bookmarking tool Delicious was bought by the web firm in 2005. He told the technology blog TechCrunch yesterday that he had no job to go to, but had decided to make the move because of the turmoil in the company.

Delicious is regarded as one of Yahoo"s strongest web assets, along with the photo-sharing site Flickr and the events tool Upcoming.

The two Flickr founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, announced this week that they were leaving the company, with Butterfield firing off a characteristically eccentric letter to Garlinghouse.

It was revealed yesterday that Garlinghouse is also to leave. He caused controversy in 2006 when he criticised the firm in a leaked internal memo for spreading itself too thinly and trying to be everything to everyone.

Qi Lu, a search advertising technology vice-president, and another senior vice-president in search, Vish Makhijani, are also leaving, anticipating a big restructure being carried out by the Yahoo president, Susan Decker.

Yahoo"s management has been criticised for failing to strike a deal with Microsoft, which had offered up to $47.5bn to take over the company. The board, led by co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang, said the offer was too low and eventually agreed a search advertising deal with Google which was greeted with derision by parts of the industry, who viewed it as an admission that Yahoo cannot compete with the search company. Yang faces intense scrutiny and has to deal with the exodus of high-profile staff.

The company said in a statement that it had confidence in its management team. "Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that"s to be expected in the internet industry."

The fallout from Yahoo"s deal with Google continued yesterday when it was criticised as anti-competitive and bad for advertisers by a senior Microsoft executive. Speaking at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Kevin Johnson said advertisers were not likely to be well served by "the search industry consolidating around a small number of platforms". As a Yahoo executive described the deal as win-win, Johnson cut in: "If "win" is consolidating 90% of the paid search market [in the US] to Google then that"s a win."