Twitters users in Japan and across the US reported that the service was down on Monday morning, shortly after WikiLeaks claimed to have been the subject of a cyber-attack.

According to a Twitter status monitor, the outage began at around 6.45am GMT and continued for around half an hour, though reports suggested the impact varied from user to user.

Reports of the outage peaked at almost 14,000, according to Downdetector.com, which also suggested that many users were still experiencing problems in Japan more than a couple of hours later.

Twitter is yet to comment on the loss of service, and it has not been acknowledged via @twitter or @support.

But the incident came shortly after WikiLeaks posted a message to its Facebook account claiming an ongoing denial-of-service attack on its servers following reports of a brief outage.

It said: "We are still under a DoS attack on our e-mail publication servers and it appears that Twitter is down as well, we are unable to confirm if this is an attack on twitter at this time."

Once they were able to get back on Twitter, some users were quick to link the two outages and the WikiLeaks release of a new set of hacked emails from the Democrat National Convention.

Those emails allege that Chelsea Clinton may have used Clinton Foundation funds to help pay for her wedding, according to a leaked email sent by Doug Band, a former top aide to Bill Clinton, to John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Earlier this year, FBI agents argued the Clinton Foundation should be investigated for potentially giving donors special political access and favours.

Yesterday, the agency cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing after a review of the latest tranche of her official emails.

(Independent)