SAN FRANCISCO (REUTERS) - Apple's iTunes and App Store came back online on Wednesday afternoon, according to its online status page, after an unusual hours-long disruption that the company blamed on an internal technical error.

The outage began a little before 5am ET, after which users vented their frustrations on Twitter about being unable to access the popular mobile app store and online content service.

Apple updated its status page at 5.04pm ET (5.04am Thursday, Singapore time) to show that the disrupted services, including the Mac App Store and iBooks, were now functioning normally.