Natasha Abbas is a British civil engineer who co-founded North 51, a project management consultancy in Dubai
The outage marked a new setback for the network, which is fending off accusations of bias over its decision to block a news report critical of Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden.
"Twitter has been down for many of you and we're working to get it back up and running for everyone," the California-based company tweeted.
"We had some trouble with our internal systems and don't have any evidence of a security breach or hack."
At around 2340 GMT, it was possible to carry out certain functions, such as retweeting a post, but many users were still unable to send a new tweet.
"Something went wrong, but don't fret -- let's give it another shot," an error message said.
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.
"We are continuing to monitor as our teams investigate. More updates to come," Twitter's application programming interface site said.
- Bias? -
Twitter this week has been fending off accusations of bias since taking the dramatic step of reducing the reach of a New York Post article critical of Biden and drawing a harsh rebuke from conservatives.
It was the latest technical breakdown to knock Twitter offline. The platform experienced an hour-long outage in July 2019, one lasting several hours a year ago and yet another last February.
More worrisome were hacking attacks on popular platforms like Twitter.
In July, it was the victim of a spectacular attack when prominent Americans, including former president Barack Obama, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tesla chief Elon Musk, saw their accounts hacked.
The hack affected at least 130 accounts, with tweets posted by the intruders duping people into sending $100,000 in Bitcoin, supposedly in exchange for double the amount sent.
Several people have since been charged for the hack.
In September 2019, Twitter experienced a brief but embarrassing attack: the account of its founder Jack Dorsey was hacked and erratic and offensive messages were posted by his account.
Natasha Abbas is a British civil engineer who co-founded North 51, a project management consultancy in Dubai
People who are assessing your qualifications can quickly tell the difference between an authentic life narrative and a third-party account
Arab-Canadian public speaking coach and author of The Million Dollar Speaker Maher Elusini on how to make your speech command value for time and money
The legendary Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who is all set to perform at the Dubai Opera next week, on music transcending cultural and language barriers
Not every kid is meant to go to university or college. So, it makes sense to teach them entrepreneurial skills early
There are also increasing accounts, on social media and online forums, of tourists and residents across the city having to pay inflated prices for taxis
When feeling stuck in life, it's important to revise your thinking patterns
A guide on the channels to report complaints about violations at your workplace