Failed attempting to join realm. Please try again later

Please help.  I subscribed yesterday to realms on Windows 10 PC version 1.8.  Another player is playing on Ipad iOS.  

This morning we tried to reconnect to our realm and got the following error message:  

Failed attempting to join realm. Please try again later

We tried many fixes:

• Log out of our accounts, log back in.  No result.  Same error message.
• Play on an backup of the realm.  No result.  Same error message.
• Read all the error logs on this board.  No result.  Same error message.
• Download an old version of the realm and upload it again.  Same error message.
• Reset realm.  No result.  'Failed to reset the realm.  Please try again later'

Please can you help me?  I don't want to buy another subscription to realms to get this working, especially if this will happen again.

And please can you post the fix so that others can learn from my misfortune?

Thanks