those services were suspended until after the merge. Forget when it was posted, but it was a while back.

Since you've paid for access and cannot activate your character, might be worth it to confirm with SE whether you will have that time prepaid when you are able to reactivate later. It should be a given, but with the recent mixups with billing, it could be a problem. Their phone/chat lines are probably still highly congested--might be better to use the messaging system at the POL support portal.