Twitter has blamed a social engineering attack on its employees for the hack yesterday which saw the accounts of big names such as Barack Obama and Bill Gates send out bitcoin scam tweets.
The chaos began yesterday afternoon when Elon Musk's account tweeted "Feeling greatful, doubling all payments to my BTC address! You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.". The message was accompanied by a link.
The accounts of Kanye West, Joe Biden, Apple, Jack Dorsey's Square Cash App and others soon sent out near identical messages, forcing Twitter to lock affected accounts and block new tweets from all verified ('Blue Tick') users.
The hackers looted up to $110,000 in donated bitcoin before the scam was shut down.
In a Tweet thread, Twitter Support says it appears a coordinated social engineering attack "successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools".
The firm says it has taken steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while it continues to investigate.
Meanwhile, CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged it had been a "tough day" for his firm: