Apple discussion forums unavailable?

I recently purchased my first apple product and naturally a few questions popped up. However, I wasn't able to access any topics on the [Apple discussion forums](https://discussions.apple.com/) during the last week, because they seem unavailable. I tried from several devices. What really irritates me is the fact that this isn't mentioned anywhere (except for [here](https://www.iphonetricks.org/apple-support-forums-an-unexpected-error/)) where I would have expected that this would make news quite quickly or that a company that puts so much focus on customer service as Apple would at least give some sort of status update if one of its major services was out of service for such a long time. So is it just me who has this problem or is it maybe a regional thing? My current workaround is to use the cached sites.