Why are you shutting down your forums?

It was an “executive decision” and while we all agree with you, it’s a done deal.  🤷‍♀️

Interesting move for sure

Like many things from the past, things have changed… the number of services ATT has offered has declined especially with the television entertainment all companies have been losing customers with cord cutting and need to reduce support costs with diminishing returns.

The internet has become more including various online resources that did not exist when the forums where started 15+ years ago where with both Reddit and YouTube founded in 2005.

Additional the company has less employees when 2007 from 309,000+ to currently 160,000+ that is 149,000 positions that have beeen eliminated either to contractors or non longer needed.

desire to reduce operational costs by another $2 billion means services that do not produce income will continue to disappear. 

Just my thoughts…

To add to the above, my feeling is that AT&T got tired of the support that customers received thru the public forums from the ACEs and other customers because it was quite often more accurate and useful than the cut and paste from the script that official AT&T Support posted. That, and the fact that the suggestion to file BBB complaints to get your issue to AT&T Upper Management probably didn't sit well.

Save costs as doesn't produce income.

Other online media may be more commonly used.

Some forum support agents were giving bad or blindly scripted info (that ACEs who are volunteers would address).

Increase in BBB complaints, some of which may have been encouraged from the forum.

Those are my suspicions for the decision. Major service providers having a user to user support forum makes sense in helping those in a medium tailored for that exact service. So the shutdown doesn't sit well with me, but I understand it is far out of my control.

AT&T Executives have rarely been known for making good decisions. Some lower level manager puts up a business case, usually one-sided, and says see how great this change is. Upper level management then approves it and the result is often less than ideal. This is then covered up as they move on, but the expense of the bad decision is buried and reflected by high AT&T operating costs.