Employee Forums Mysteriously Disappear!

I wanted to reach out to my fellow employees about the hour-cutting policy using the employee forums we have on one of our websites. To my astonishment, those forums appear to be gone! The links to them still exist, but every one I tried gives an error message. Now there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I received no notice that the forums were going to be discontinued. The timing of this is painfully convenient; as if our employer didn't want us to discuss their new policy among ourselves. I'll post more information about this if I find any.