Twitter has blamed a "cascading bug" for rendering the social networking site inaccessible on Thursday. Users from around the world reported difficulties logging on to the site after problems started at about 17:00 BST. The service was affected for around two hours while engineers sought to solve the issue.

In a blog post, Twitter dismissed reports it had been hacked, and offered "sincere apologies" to its users. "A cascading bug is one with an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect "cascades" into other elements as well," explained Mazen Rawashdeh, the site's vice president of engineering.  "One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today.  "As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter."

Source: BBC