Twitter begins to regain its voice after two-hour outage

Twitter is beginning to come back online for users after a technical problem caused an outage that lasted more than two hours.

Users of the site began reporting problems at around 8.30am on Tuesday, with Twitter timelines sporadically reappearing for some users on mobile apps just before 11am.

It makes the issue one of the longest-lasting in the micro-blogging site's almost 10-year history. The site's client apps, including Tweetdeck, also appeared to be back online.

Twitter is still yet to officially confirm it has resolved the issue, or comment on what caused it.

Though short, regular blackouts were common in the early days of the site - an Apple live event caused it to crash under the weight of traffic in 2008 - extended outages have become less frequent in recent years, with the last major drop in service occurring in 2014 when the site was down for around 45 minutes.

The social media platform posted to its status page to acknowledge the problem, while an error message on the Twitter homepage mentioned a "technical problem".

The status message read: "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution."

According to the website Down Detector, which tracks outages on major websites, the issue began at around 8.30am, with the number of reported problems from users rising rapidly.

More than half of those who reported an issue did so concerning the website, but users of the iOS and Android mobile apps also reported problems.