"At approximately 9:00 am PDT (around 10 PM India time), we discovered that Twitter was inaccessible for all web users, and mobile clients were not showing new Tweets," Twitter Vice President (Engineering) Mazen Rawashdeh posted on the company's blog.
He further said that Twitter once again went down at around 10:40 am (Pacific Daylight Time), or 11:40 PM IST.
The US-based company blamed the outage to a "cascading bug" in one of its infrastructure components.
"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," Rawashdeh said.
"We began recovery at around 10:10am PDT, dropped again around 10:40 am PDT, and then began full recovery at 11:08 am PDT," he added.
According to media reports, a hacker for the group UG Nazi, which has in the past been affiliated with LulzSec, claimed responsibility for the downage, attributing it to a simple distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack.
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Founded in 2006, Twitter has 140 million users across the globe and receives nearly 400 million tweets daily.
"For the past six months, we have enjoyed our highest marks for site reliability and stability ever: at least 99.96 per cent and often 99.99 per cent. In simpler terms, this means that in an average 24-hour period, twitter.Com has been stable and available to everyone for roughly 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40-ish seconds," Rawashdeh said.