Twitter has apologised to its users after an outage on Thursday caused by “an internal system change”.

Users across the US and the UK experienced difficulty in accessing the social media networking service, with website downdetector.co.uk reporting that tens of thousands of reports had been made during the outage.

A short while after the outage began, @TwitterSupport posted a statement which read: “Twitter is back up for some people, and we’re working to make sure our service is available to everyone as quickly as possible.

“The interruption was due to an internal system change, which we’re now fixing. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and should be at 100% soon.”

The “fail whale” cartoon became symbolic of the widespread nature of outages on Twitter in its early years, and was retired in 2013.

The outage occurred as US president Donald Trump convened a White House conference of like-minded critics of Big Tech.