deliberately unreachable, the reverse of good customer service

I'm traveling in Africa. The day after I flew in, I bought a local SIM card, because I'm going to be here for several weeks and I need more reliable data than I have with my guesthouse wifi. Only after I got back to my room did I realize that my AT&T iPhone is locked, making the SIM card useless to me. In the past, I've bought my iPhones from Apple, and they were not locked. OK - so I'll request that my phone be unlocked. I've been a faithful AT&T customer for many years, and I've been using this phone for a long time; I was confident they would do this for me. No. The website where you request that your phone be unlocked has been displaying the same really annoying "Oops!" message for a week now. They're a communication company, and their own website is permanently down! That's bad sign number 1. Then the chat option for speaking with customer service is also non-functional. It keeps trying in vain to load the page. That's bad sign number 2. It seems clear that they are deliberately evading customer requests for unlocking, which I'm pretty sure is against the law. I'm on unemployed leave this year with no income; I'm living off my savings. Plus I'm going to be out of the country a lot, so I have reduced my AT&T plan to a minimal pre-paid plan, just for this year. I did this because I was loyal to AT&T; I wanted to keep my account open, and it was my intention to go back to my expensive unlimited data plan when I go back to work next September. But they have definitely lost my loyalty now. When I get back to the States in December, I will be leaving AT&T as quickly as I possibly can. They do not deserve my business. Oh, and here's bad sign number 3: under "topic" for this comment, I'm not able to pick the category of Customer Service. That's my complaint. The service is horrible. But I'm not allowed to post anything about Customer Service. I have to assign it some other topic. Because God forbid that I might create an impression in the minds of other people reading this forum that AT&T has bad service. News flash, AT&T - by someone gets to this forum, they already know you have horrible customer service. Oh - here's bad sign number 4. Posting in the forum requires creating a new account? The fact that I've had an AT&T login for years, that I pay every bill online, that account doesn't count here? WHY? The only possible reason is to make it as difficult as possible to post complaints. I'm a polite person, so I am not typing all the names that I am calling AT&T right now.