Twitter in the midst of fixing outage that hit thousands globally

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc said it was in the process of fixing a worldwide outage on its microblogging website and dashboard management platform TweetDeck, which had affected thousands of users for several hours on Wednesday.

"The issue is just about fixed. You should be able to access Twitter as usual. If not, give it a few more minutes!" Twitter said in a tweet following multiple user complaints on its website. (https://bit.ly/2mSx1ne)

Earlier in the day, outage monitoring website Outage.report had received more than 4,000 reports of the incident globally, including Japan, Canada and India. (https://bit.ly/2mPBjvK)

The outage spurred #TwitterDown as a trending hash tag in the U.S.

"You might have had trouble Tweeting, getting notifications, or viewing DMs. We're currently working on a fix, and should be back to normal soon", the company said in a tweet about 7 hours ago, which did not give further details. (https://bit.ly/2plFBfn)

A Twitter representative had earlier told Reuters that the company was investigating issues with TweetDeck, which is used by reporters and other content creators for monitoring tweets from multiple Twitter accounts.

The company in July was hit by a similar outage due to an internal system change for more than an hour, affecting nearly 70,000 people globally according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Twitter's shares were down nearly 1% at $39.80 in trading before the bell.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh, Mekhla Raina and Ambhini Aishwarya in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernard Orr and Shounak Dasgupta)