Posted June 19, 2017 12:27:47

Fans may have been eagerly watching singer Beyonce's Instagram for news of her twins' birth — but it seems her dad has beaten her to the punch.

The "queen of pop"'s father Matthew Knowles, with whom she has had a strained relationship, posted a birthday message to the twins, captioned "They're here!" and signed "Love, Granddad".

He used plenty of hashtags, including #beyonce, #jayz and #twins.

The singer, 35, and her husband, rapper Jay Z, 47, married in 2008 and already have one child together.

Knowles was the manager of Destiny's Child — the R&B group Beyonce was the lead singer of from the late 1990s.

Beyonce, 35, announced the impending arrival of her twins in an Instagram post in February, which was liked more than 11 million times.

"We have been blessed two times over," the post was captioned.

"We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two, and we thank you for your well wishes."

Twitter went wild over the news, with more than 500,000 tweets about the announcement in the first hour.

But Beyonce has revealed few details about her pregnancy, and did not say when the babies were due to be born.

The pregnancy forced her to bow out of the Coachella music festival in April.

Last month, Beyonce posted photos on Instagram of her African-themed "Carter Push Party".

When the couple's first child, daughter Blue Ivy Carter, was born in 2012, they reportedly rented out an entire floor of a New York hospital.

They waited weeks to confirm Blue Ivy's birth.

The couple opted to post the highly-anticipated first photographs of newborn Blue Ivy on Tumblr, rather than selling them to the highest bidder.

ABC/AP

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, pop, popular-culture, social-media, human-interest, united-states