Internet company Yahoo announced Friday that it would be closing down some of its products as it aims to focus on its core services, such as communications, digital magazines, search and video.

Jay Rossiter, Senior Vice President of the Cloud Platform Group at Yahoo, wrote in a Tumblr post that the company wanted to tell users some of the product changes that would potentially affect them.

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Yahoo Education, which helps its users find information to further their education, will be shut down on Sept. 30. Some of its features include Yahoo Reference, which has content from a wide variety of sources and Homework Help, which offers CliffsNotes literature notes and practice math problems with step-by-step explanations.

Qwiki, an iOS app that automatically transforms the photos and videos from a user's camera roll into movies, is set to be closed on Nov. 1. It was acquired by Yahoo earlier in July for $50 million.

Yahoo was started almost 20 years ago as a website directory that guided users while exploring the Internet. Yahoo Directory, as this part of Yahoo services was later named, would no longer be functional starting on Dec. 31.

Meanwhile, the Sunnyvale-based company is currently under fire from the United States government over Yahoo users' private data.

Ron Bell, Yahoo's general counsel, said on the company's Tumblr page that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review released over 1,500 pages of previously secret documents that are related to the company's dispute with the government in 2007 over the data Yahoo's users have with the company.

While the documents are currently unavailable, Yahoo is making a conscious effort in making them accessible to the public.

"Back in 2007, after the government amended a key law to demand user information from online services ... we refused to comply with what we viewed as unconstitutional and overbroad surveillance and challenged the U.S. government's authority," Bell said.

However, Yahoo lost at the initial challenge and one appeal. The rulings against the firm strengthened the U.S. government's position that gathering of user's private data from technology companies was legally justified by the concerns for national security.

TagsYahoo, Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Education, Yahoo Ron Bell, Tumblr, Jay Rossiter, NSA, National Security Agency