SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter went offline for almost two hours on Thursday, in an outage that the social media platform - used by hundreds of millions worldwide - blamed on a technical glitch. The company said there was no evidence that its security had been breached.

It marked a new setback for the company, which late Thursday altered its policies on hacked content after accusations of bias stemming from its decision to block a news report critical of Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden.

"We are continuing to monitor the issue, and things appear to have returned to normal," Twitter's application programming interface site said at 0011 GMT Friday. The California-based company tweeted earlier: "We had some trouble with our internal systems and don't have any evidence of a security breach or hack."

According to downdetector.com, users on every continent had reported being unable to use the platform, but the outages were concentrated on the east and west coasts of the United States, as well as Japan. The outage appeared to have started around 2130 GMT.

The Twitter shutdown came at a delicate moment. The company this week took the dramatic step of reducing the reach of a New York Post article critical of Biden, because of the possibility that the story was based on hacked information.