EA's Third 2026 Layoff Round Skips the Studios and Hits Player Support Instead

EA spent this week cutting jobs again. Not a studio this time. The cuts landed on customer support, trust and safety, IT, and recruitment, which makes this the third confirmed round of layoffs at the company in 2026 and the first one pointed squarely at the people who deal with players after a game ships.

Kotaku reported the cuts on June 24 and said it had seen an internal email sent to EA's Fan Care support division. EA has not said how many people lost their jobs and has not put out a public statement. The roles span remote positions in the United States and EA's office in Hyderabad, India, where, per Kotaku, some of the people let go had been there more than ten years.

EA's own wording, quoted from that email, is that it is changing roles to "adapt how we work to better meet fans' changing needs," and that some work will move to "different teams, locations, or service partners." That last phrase is the one to sit with. "Service partners" is how a large company says outsourcing without saying outsourcing.

What trust and safety actually does

Trust and safety sounds like a compliance box. It is closer to the plumbing. These are the teams that moderate player behavior, enforce the anti-harassment rules in online lobbies, watch over anti-cheat systems, and chase fraud. Fan Care is the human you reach when your account gets locked, a purchase fails, or the store charges you for something you never got.

Cut headcount in those functions and the games keep running, but the experience around them gets worse. Reports take longer to action. Cheaters stay in the queue longer. Account problems sit unresolved while the line backs up. When the tech industry trimmed trust and safety teams between 2021 and 2023, those were the documented results, and there is no reason EA's titles would be the exception.

The games in the blast radius are not small. EA Sports FC 26, Battlefield 6, and Apex Legends are all live-service multiplayer titles where moderation and support are the difference between a tolerable lobby and a sewer. The people who keep those spaces functional are the ones who got the email.

Why the cuts come before the deal closes

The backdrop here is the buyout. EA agreed in September 2025 to be taken private in a roughly $55 billion deal, the largest leveraged buyout in gaming history. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund holds the controlling stake, reported at around 93 percent. Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the firm founded by Jared Kushner, hold the rest. Shareholders approved it in December 2025.

A leveraged buyout means the company gets loaded with debt to finance its own sale. When this one closes, EA carries roughly $20 billion in loan debt arranged mainly by JPMorgan. That debt has to be paid out of EA's operating cash, which is the part that connects the buyout to the layoff email. Cost cutting in a deal like this is not a reaction to a bad quarter. It is a standing obligation that lasts as long as the debt does. CreditSights pegged the leverage at roughly six times gross earnings at close, which is the kind of number that turns "trim where you can" into a multi-year policy.

That is the awkward part. EA is not a company bleeding out. Its fiscal 2026 results showed net revenue of $7.531 billion and record net bookings of $8.026 billion. Net income did drop about 21 percent year over year, from $1.121 billion to $887 million, but this is a profitable business cutting the people who answer player tickets because the math of the sale says it has to.

The promise that didn't hold

In October 2025, after the buyout was announced, CEO Andrew Wilson told staff there would be no "immediate changes" to the workforce. Three rounds of cuts later, that line reads differently.

February took staff at Full Circle, the studio that has spent years on the Skate reboot. March hit the four Battlefield studios, DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive, which is its own kind of decision given Battlefield 6 had moved more than seven million copies in three days and taken UK Game of the Year at the Ukie awards. June is the third round, and the first to skip the developers and go for the support and safety side instead.

None of this started in 2026. EA cut around 800 people in 2023 and another 670 or so in early 2024, about five percent of the company at the time. The current ownership is inheriting a habit, not inventing one. What is new is the target. Every earlier round took people who build the games. This one takes the people who clean up after they ship.

The part EA does not control yet

The deal is not done. The buyer consortium filed for EU antitrust approval on June 17, with an initial decision due July 22. Separately, the deal still faces review from CFIUS, the US panel that screens foreign purchases of American companies on national security grounds, with a contractual deadline of September 28. If regulators sink it, the consortium owes EA a $1 billion break fee.

CFIUS is the real question mark. PIF is a sovereign fund controlled by the Saudi state, and EA sits on a reported 700 million-plus accounts. In October 2025, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren wrote to the Treasury Secretary urging scrutiny and warning about "surveillance of Americans, covert Saudi propaganda, and selective retaliation." Critics have also framed the purchase as part of Saudi Arabia's broader spending on sports and entertainment to soften its image abroad, a charge the kingdom rejects. A petition asking the Treasury to block the deal had passed 73,000 signatures. EA, for its part, says it will keep creative control and that its values will "remain unchanged" under the new owners.

What is not changing, for now

The development pipeline is intact. Active games are still getting updates. EA Sports FC 26 got a World's Game update this month that added 53 national teams, and Battlefield 6 is still running its seasonal content. If you only play EA games and never file a ticket, you may not notice anything for a while.

The change is in the layer around the games. Expect the support queue to move slower. Expect reports of cheating and harassment to sit longer before anyone human looks at them. Anti-cheat software does not disappear when you cut trust and safety staff, but the people who handle the edge cases the software cannot, the appeals, the escalations, the calls a script gets wrong, there are fewer of them now. That is the cost players will actually feel, and it will show up quietly, one slow ticket at a time.