Twitter Inc said on Tuesday (Aug 9) it had fixed issues after thousands of users reported that they were having trouble accessing the micro-blogging platform.

More than 27,000 users had reported outages of the service, according to Downdetector.com, a website which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

The outage started at 1.50pm Eastern time (1.50am Singapore time) and had as many as 35,000 reports at its peak.

"We fixed it! We made an internal systems change that didn't go as planned and have rolled it back. Twitter should now be loading as expected. Sorry about that!," Twitter said in a tweet.

This was the second outage in as many months.

The social media company is in a legal tussle with Tesla boss Elon Musk over his $44 billion (S$60.6 billion) takeover deal.

Last month, Twitter users faced a nearly three-hour outage in July, with the San Francisco-based company saying it had some trouble with its internal systems that impacted many globally.

Notorious for outages in its early years, Twitter was known for using its popular "Fail Whale" illustration, which showed a beluga whale being lifted by birds, during such incidents.

Twitter users took to Reddit to complain about the outage, with many users saying all they could see was the Twitter logo when they tried to log in.

"There is no Twitter to find out why Twitter isn't working" one user joked on a Reddit channel dedicated to Twitter.

Twitter had suffered another widespread outage in February that it blamed on a software glitch.

Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour disruption at Meta Platforms keeping WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users in October.

Source: Reuters