WASHINGTON - The IRS says it has resolved a computer system outage and is again accepting electronically filed tax returns.

In a statement on Thursday, the agency says it had resumed processing individual and business tax returns at about 5 p.m. Eastern, a day after a "hardware failure" forced the shutdown of several tax processing systems, including the e-file system.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says taxpayers should see little, if any, impact on their returns or refunds. He says employees worked through the night to get the system back online and apologized for the inconvenience.

The agency says taxpayers do not have to take any additional action due to the outage, even those who filed returns electronically before or after the computer problems.