Cannot Redeem a Subscription Code

So yesterday I bought my friend off of amazon a 60 day game time code and sent him the code that amazon sends you. When he logged in at https://account.swtor.com/user/codes he clicks on 'redeem code' he gets the error: EA billing & management services cannot be accessed at this time. However when I do the same thing with MY account, I have no issue going to code redemption, I could put in the code if I wanted to, he can't get that far, then we tried to go to https://account.swtor.com/user/subscription which is linked directly on the code redemption paged, scroll down, click the 'game time code' and same issue: EA billing & management services cannot be accessed at this time. I do the same thing with my account, it works fine! So I try to log in with his account on my end to see if I could put the code in for him, and then I got the same issue with him. The question is: why is it that I, a long time sub with recurring sub, able to redeem codes, but a new player trying to get his first subscription, having so much trouble? I have permission from my friend to provide any information about his account to get it resolved.