Twitter accounts of Obama, Biden, Gates, Bezos, Musk, others hacked in major breach

Guwahati: Twitter witnessed a major breach on Thursday with accounts of several prominent people getting hacked. The hacked accounts posted messages exhorting followers to fork up cryptocurrency.

Twitter accounts of Apple, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were among the ones that were breached. The cyber scam came to light when a tweet was sent from Musk's account. It read, "I'm feeling generous because of Covid-19. I'll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!" A bitcoin address was also shared along with the tweet but was later deleted.

This was followed by another tweet from the same account, which read, "Feeling grateful doubling all payments sent to my BTC address! You send $1,000. I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes." But a few minutes later, this tweet was also removed.

Twitter responded to the unfortunate incident in a tweet from its official Twitter Support account. "We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly," read the company's tweet.

Following this, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote, "Tough days for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened." He also assured that a team is trying to find out what exactly happened and it will be communicated when everything is clear.

Limiting the ability to tweet and citing other security reasons, Twitter further blocked the hacked accounts. In another tweet, the company said, "We are continuing to limit the ability to tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience."

Meanwhile, the spokesperson of Bill Gates confirmed that there was no tweet sent out by Bill Gates. "We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates. This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and is working to restore the account," as said by his spokesperson to Recode.

Other celebrities whose accounts were hacked included Barack Obama, Joe Biden, American rappers Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa, Kim Kardashian, Warren Buffet, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

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