Myself along with many others I know are currently struggling to get onto minecraft realms. When you initially open the realms page, the page is blank and gives an error-500 message. 
if you are lucky enough for the realms to show up, when connecting to a realm you receive the message "Realms service error (500) Could not connect to Realms: Read timed out". 
Since I pay for the realm monthly, this is very frustrating that neither I nor my friends can even use it. This issue has only started occurring recently and seems to be more so in the early evening (PST) and evening (EST). If the issue keeps occurring, I will have no choice but to stop my realm as there is no point in keeping it up if we cannot use it, however, I would love if this issue could be resolved as I don't want to have to stop using Realms.