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Scotland's national rail operator has apologised after technical problems left rush hour commuters with difficulty purchasing tickets.

The disruption on Tuesday morning saw a number of ticket machines unable to work at stations across the country.

Problems were also reported with the ScotRail app, including claims that it had taken money from passengers but not provided tickets.

The operator said that the issues had been reported for investigation.

Pictures on social media showed large queues at Glasgow Central station but commuters said only two members of staff were on duty to sell tickets manually.

Other stations affected by the nationwide outage included Edinburgh Waverley, Perth, Falkirk High and Linlithgow.

Kirsty Fraser was travelling from Glasgow's Charing Cross to Edinburgh Waverley but when she went to download her ticket from the ScotRail app she got an "oops!" error message.

She told ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland News: "The ticket machine was out of order and there was already a big queue at the ticket desk which had one staff member working it.

"Eventually another member of staff just let us all through the barriers as there was a double queue forming for tickets.

"When I changed at Queen Street for the Edinburgh train there were huge snaking queues on the platform for a ticket from there."

The issue is believed to have been caused by a network outage between 08:00 and 09:00 for online ticket seller Trainline, which powers ScotRail's booking platform.

Phil Campbell, ScotRail customer operations director, said: "We're sorry to customers who were inconvenienced by this incident, and we share their frustration.

"Our network provider worked as quickly as possible to get systems back up and running and restore services on our app and self-service machines."

The rail operator added that services had now returned to normal.