Google has said that a "technical issue" was responsible for an outage that took the video-sharing site YouTube down for an hour on Thursday morning.

CNN had reported that users worldwide were unable to access YouTube from 7 a. m. to 8 a. m. EDT. There was no evidence of a denial of service attack or of retaliation for its decision to stop censoring search results for its Chinese service, Google said.

A Google spokeswoman said in a statement, "YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved. We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused."

It had been under attack by hackers apparently trying to get information on Chinese dissidents, Google said in January.

The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was down for several hours on Wednesday for what proved to be a technical problem. (With Inputs from Agencies)