Testing In App Purchases - Cannot Connect to iTunes Store

I'm returning to some code I wrote in 2012. Back then, I had created a wrapper for the StoreKit framework that also did receipt validation using the sandbox URL for iTunes.

Since it's been so long, I looked through the StoreKit docs and AFAIK, nothing's changed.

For some reason, I can't test my In App Purchases anymore because I get the above error (Cannot Connect to iTunes Store) and the sandbox servers seem to be down (http://ift.tt/1fKihJh).

It's been down for the past 2 days. Is this normal? Or has the process for testing changed since when I first wrote this code?