https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171004/06592338339/hacks-are-always-worse-than-reported-all-yahoo-email-was-hacked-2013-all-it.shtml

Given recent and massive stories about data security breaches by some very, very large players in the technology and financial spaces, we have developed a mantra that you should have on repeat in your head any time you read stories about a breach: however big the breach is reported to be initially, it's always bigger. We formulated that 12 years ago and it has continually held true. We saw it with Equifax. We saw it with Deloitte. And you will also likely recall that 2013 and 2014 were not banner years for data security at a little company called Yahoo. Hacks of Yahoo's email platform were reported initially to be in the hundreds of thousands in terms of the number of accounts compromised. As Verizon began negotiating the purchase of Yahoo, that number crept into the hundreds of millions. Eventually, Yahoo settled on a billion compromised accounts resulting from the hacks.

The Verizon deal went through, with a hefty price reduction as a result of the security breaches. And so it's under the Verizon umbrella that Yahoo informed the public this past week that the need for numerical quantification for the two security breaches has been rendered moot. Because it's much easier to just say, "Yahoo email was compromised." As in: all of it.