Telecom Italia (TIM) was hit by Internet issues over the weekend, with thousands of customers impacted.

The company blamed an international interconnection problem for the glitches.

Users complained of outages and glitches yesterday (February 5), with people across the country from Milan in the north, to the Sicilian capital Palermo impacted.

The issue mainly impacted fixed-line services.

"An international interconnection problem impacting the service at national level was detected. Analyses are underway to resolve the problem," a TIM spokesperson said.

The outages will come as a further setback to the debt-ridden telco, which has been subject to months of speculation about its future.

Last week the company received a non-binding offer from KKR, valuing TIM's fixed network assets at around €20 billion ($22bn).