SAN FRANCISCO (AFP/REUTERS) - An array of Apple services including the App Store and Apple TV were knocked offline for several hours on Thursday (June 2) due to an unexplained technical glitch.

An official Apple status webpage confirmed the outage, which appeared to have started just before 4pm Eastern Daylight Time (4am Singapore time), according to a timeline provided on the tech giant's support page.

By Thursday evening in California, Apple said all its services, including the App Store, had resumed. Apple's US Web page showed all applications had resumed as of 11.55pm Eastern Daylight Time. "There are no reported issues at this time," the company said a few minutes later on its Web page.

Although some of the company's services resumed earlier, including the App Store functionality that was up at about 6.30pm EDT, other services related to iCloud and the Photos application had remained unavailable to some users.

Users in various locations including North America, Europe and parts of Asia flocked to social media reporting issues purchasing and updating apps, as well as backing up devices and streaming from Apple TV.

The California-based company declined to discuss the cause, extent or duration of the outage, instead referring AFP to the status page.

A message on the Apple status page said the outage affected multiple iCloud and store services, and that the company was "investigating".