Payment app PayPal experienced a brief outage worldwide on Thursday, it confirmed.

It said in a post on its service status page it was experiencing "a system issue" that affected multiple PayPal Products - including account withdrawal and express checkout.

The company said the technical issue was swiftly resolved.

However, even a brief outage was enough to cause problems for customers, who reported being unable to log in to their accounts or said they were having problems making payments.

Platform outage monitor Downdetector had received more than seven thousand reports from users as of 12:12 GMT.

According to the company's service status dashboard, the incident began at 10:53 UTC.

It said its cryptocurrency services and peer-to-peer payment app, Venmo, were among its services affected by the outage.

Customers took to social media to post about not being able to access their accounts.

Several users on X, formerly Twitter, posted screenshots of an alert telling them "please check your entries and try again" when attempting to log in.

Founded in 1998, PayPal has grown to become a major, global financial institution.

It told investors in October that its total number of active accounts across its operations had soared to 432 million in the period ending 30 September.