Problems connecting with Ruby Twitter gem (and twitter4r)

[Thame]

I have a couple of Twitter apps that have been running fine for weeks,
but recently my requests have been failing (all the time) and I'm
wondering if anything has changed with the API or if this is just a
temporary problem.

I'm using the regular twitter ruby gem (http://twitter.rubyforge.org/)
for one, and twitter4r (http://twitter4r.rubyforge.org/) for the other
and they both return equivalent "Twitter::CantConnect" errors. Even
simple requests from the command line like "twitter friends" return
the same error.

Any ideas?