what happened to my me.com address

Suddenly, a few days ago, I am unable to send email using my me.com address, with each attempt to reply to email, or to send new coming up with an error message. I now find that the me.com servers no longer exist and I must use iCloud.com instead. I have been an apple customer for 40 years. When they offered a free mac.com address I jumped on it (and got my preferred name @mac.com). The switch to me.com was relatively seamless and transparent (and one less key press -- yay!). In fact, I could still send and receive mac.com mail through me.com, up to a few days ago.

Now, me.com is gone (I don't remember Apple telling me they were going to do this). So how does one deal with this? Thankfully I don't have a large mailing list to send updates to using a new email address (which may or may not be recognized), but I do have a large number of sites accessed with what is my old email. My email will need to be updated as will the keychains. And old keychains will presumably need to be deleted or something. What a pain.