On October 21 Electronic Arts cut about 400 jobs and closed BioWare, the studio behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Netflix cut roughly 1,000 people this month, its largest round since 2022, mostly in product, tech, legal and human resources. eBay is reportedly cutting 9 percent of its staff. All three sit in the information sector, which has lost 4.2 percent of its jobs over the past year. That is the worst of the thirteen sectors we track and the only one down by more than 1.5 percent. It is also the sector that uses AI more than any other: 46.4 percent of information businesses told the Census Bureau they had used it in the previous two weeks, against 24.6 percent nationally.
Break that decline into the six industries the sector is made of, though, and most of it is not software. Information has lost 376,000 jobs since it peaked in November 2022. Motion picture and sound recording accounts for 127,600 of them. Telecommunications accounts for 99,500. Those two industries are three fifths of the entire decline. Publishing, which is where software publishers are counted, accounts for 85,500, and computing infrastructure, data processing and web hosting for 29,200.
