The Malaysian government said Friday that it can't confirm the report.
And a senior U.S. official offered a conflicting account Thursday, telling CNN that "there is probably a significant likelihood" the plane is on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Among the things being considered is whether lithium batteries in the cargo hold, which have been blamed in previous crashes, played a role in the disappearance, according to U.S. officials briefed on the latest developments in the investigation.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release details to the media.
If the batteries being carried on the plane caused a fire, it still doesn't fully explain other anomalies with Flight 370, the officials say.
Malaysian officials, who are coordinating the search, said Friday that the hunt for the plane was spreading deeper into both the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
India has deployed assets from its navy, coast guard and air force to the south Andaman Sea to take part in the search, the country's Ministry of Defense said Friday.
Indian search teams are combing large areas of the archipelago. Two aircraft are searching land and coastal areas of the island chain from north to south, an Indian military spokesman said Friday, and two coast guard ships have been diverted to search along the islands' east coast. Indian officials are also including part of the Bay of Bengal in their search, officials said.
As of Friday, 57 ships and 48 aircraft from 13 countries were involved in the search, Hishammuddin Hussein, the minister in charge of defense and transportation, said at a news briefing.
China, which said it would be extending its search, said crews have searched more than 27,000 square miles (about 70,000 square kilometers) of the South China Sea without finding anything.
On Friday, the United States sent the destroyer USS Kidd to scout the Indian Ocean as the search expands into that body of water.
"I, like most of the world, really have never seen anything like this," Cmdr. William Marks of the U.S. 7th Fleet said of the scale of the search. "It's pretty incredible."
"It's a completely new game now," he said. "We went from a chess board to a football field."
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