Twitter appeared to be returning for some users after experiencing an hourlong outage that affected its app and website around the world Thursday.

It was the first major outage for the service since February.

Individuals attempting to use the social media platform were met with a message saying “Tweets aren't loading right now. Try again." According to Downdetector, users began reporting the outage around 8 a.m. EDT. About an hour later, the service began to return.

Twitter's status page offered no information during the outage, showing only the message “All Systems Operational."

The outage comes days after Twitter sued Elon Musk for violating his $44 billion deal to buy the company and asked a Delaware court to order the world's richest person to complete the takeover.

The outage began around 8:00 ET and prevented users from logging into the micro-blogging site on desktops and mobile phones.

It was not clear what caused the outage. Users were getting an error message: "Tweets aren't loading right now." Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its status dashboard indicated that all systems were operational.

The company had suffered another widespread outage in February that it blamed on a software glitch.

Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour interruption keeping Meta Platforms' WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of the reach billions of users in October.

Notorious for outages in its early years, Twitter used to use its popular "Fail Whale" illustration, a beluga being lifted by birds, for such incidents but discontinued the logo in 2013.

Those who could use Twitter jokingly blamed the outage on Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Inc. "Elon Musk creates Twitter outage," one user tweeted.

Twitter shares were marginally down at $36.60 before the bell on Thursday.

This report contains material from Reuters and The Associated Press.