Many high-profile Twitter accounts including those of former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were simultaneously hacked by attackers to spread a cryptocurrency scam.
Hijacked accounts posted scam tweets soliciting bitcoin transfers from followers. "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," read Elon Musk's now-deleted tweet.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Thursday said that they are diagnosing of exactly what happened. "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened. We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened," Dorsey said in a tweet.
In their initial investigation, Twitter said that they have detected a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of their employees with access to internal systems and tools.
Meanwhile, Twitter users reacted with hilarious memes and jokes as the incident came to light. Here are some of the Twitter reactions:
