At the peak of the outage, at about 0035 GMT, DownDetector said more than 10,000 people reported problems with the platform, which is now owned by the mercurial billionaire Elon Musk.

AFP journalists in the United States and Asia were among those experiencing difficulties.

But less than an hour later, the number of reported issues was down to just over 3,700.

“Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering,” Netblocks said in a tweet.

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has been riven by chaos, with mass layoffs, the return of banned accounts and the suspension of journalists critical of the South African-born billionaire.

In response to a tweet from a user asking if Twitter was “broken,” Musk replied: “Works for me.”