Twitter stops verified accounts from tweeting after hacking incident

Some of the most famous people in the world were hacked on Wednesday night.

Twitter stopped verified accounts from being able to tweet on Wednesday night, following a wide-scale bitcoin hacking incident. Kanye West, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were among those who were targeted by the hackers. The hacked accounts tweeted telling people that they had 30 minutes to send $1,000 in bitcoin in order to be sent back twice as much. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to Twitter this morning to shed some light on the situation, referring to the whole incident as a "tough day" for everyone working for the social media network. Dorsey said: "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." Twitter said that it detected what it believes to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of Twitter's own employees with access to internal systems and tools. Accounts that were compromised were locked, and access will only be restored to the owner when Twitter are confident that it is secure. Twitter's support team said: "Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing."