+1 having the exact same issues as Shelley describes.
It seems as if the realm is closed/turned off in the backend and my instance needs to boot before I can access it. It starts booting the first time I try to join it seems. As when I wait long enough, it is available ^^ Would be a great money saver to use A.I. to predict when someone is normally on the server and have it online by the time I'm logging in. And otherwise give a message: booting up... wait a minute.
Mouse works great with looking around and punching things, keyboard that I bought to play Minecraft on my iPad Pro works with everything except Minecraft... However that is of course “works as intended”. These options I see in the game are clearly not for this keyboard😉 Who is playing on IOS with a keyboard anyways!