delericho
Legend
I can see turning off new subscriptions and renewals if you are contemplating turning off the service in a year or so. I don't see a situation where allowing renewals, but not allowing new subscriptions offers value to the company.
It's possible that they've had significantly more IT-related issues associated with new accounts than with simple renewals, and that as the service winds down they've therefore cut that more labour-intensive part of the system.
(Plus, of course, they've probably still got a significant number of customers on monthly auto-renews, so switching that off probably means turning out the lights in short order.)
If this is right, I'd expect them to write to customers in the near-ish future saying that they'll be turning off the renewal process fairly soon, and giving people a last chance to renew for, at a guess, another 12 months.