Why am i not able to cancel my directv stream service?

Yes customer service is bad everywhere, that is not the complaint here. Direct TV is using tactics to make it extra hard to cancel. If I struggle to cancel they may get an extra month or two out of me before I manage to actually follow through and do it. Maybe I give up. Either way those extra months of me paying due to deceptive tactics adds up to lots of $$$ in direct tv pockets. They have an incentive to make it hard to cancel, so they do it on purpose to make more money. Who cares if they (Edited per community guidelines) us off, we want to cancel anyway.

@Jrandomuser I'm sorry but you are coming across quite similar to @juniper, albeit admiting some fault but mostly blaming direct tv issues on a bigger lack of workers problem. Doesn't mean they have to be deceptive. Why do you float around this message board trying to take up for Direct tv. Seems very suspicious to me. Either you're getting kickbacks, free tv, or you're a bot. Read through this thread and it's obvious who the real customers are... the ones that are (Edited per community guidelines) at direct tv's deceptive tactics when it comes to canceling.

Call it what it is... DECEPTION! The app doesn't crash, it just suddenly won't allow you to chat when you want to cancel. That is not a glitch, that is designed behavior. Happened to me, my wife, and many people on this thread. Suddenly you can't click chat to cancel once you have made it clear you want to cancel. Deception.

I'm not "admitting" anything - I don't work for DirecTV, I'm just a customer, so have nothing to do with it.  If you've seen many of my posts, you would know I very rarely praise DTV Stream's functionality or Support - most often I indicate unhappiness with both.  That said, I also don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, and when someone posts something that is clearly untrue or "tin-foil hattish", I will call them on it.  You have drifted into that territory.  I understand you are unhappy, but that's not an excuse to either make fairly silly claims or to personally attack other people.

I think much of the problem is that the CS reps are badly trained and just don't do the job well.  Some of it is that their chat system isn't great and likely got worse when DTV needed their own rather than using AT&T's.  Did they intentionally make it harder to cancel a subscription?  Relative to the early days, they clearly did.  Are they intentionally being deceptive?  That's a wider bridge to cross - I don't think their reps would be up to it and there could be (expensive) legal consequences if it could be proven.

If that were the case though, why not just remove the prompts to cancel online altogether? Why even leave that stuff up? Just direct customers to call instead of having them jump through hoops only for it to not work.

@Jrandomuser almost every person in this thread is saying the same thing, they can't click chat to cancel in the app. We are all saying the same thing. Whether it needs to be removed from the app and is just a coincidental accident in the software that you can't cancel, or it is on purpose, this thread has been up for over a year for them to view and correct, but they have not done so. So I chose to believe they are aware of it but take no corrective action because it makes them money. Are the reps in on it, no probably not, they just have to deal with more pissed off people calling them then they should have to if it clearly said, please call to cancel.

I think your philosophical quote should be modified

"Never attribute malice to what can easily be explained by stupidity... unless that malice/stupidity makes you money... in which case who cares if it's malice or stupidity let's keep making more money and just claim ignorance, we dont have workers, sorry its a computer glitch and we cant fix it even though its been going on for over a year!"

@Lame 

I am not a shill. So please don't spread lies. I am a consumer like most others in the forum.

You may not like my responses but they are honest and are intended to help, which sometimes just means providing a realistic perspective (that some sorely need when they make up conspiracy theories).