A wave of hacked account tweets shook Twitter Wednesday, as more than half a dozen personalities, including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, billionaire Bill Gates and rapper Kanye West, filed bitcoin donations.
The cause of the hack was unclear, but the scale and scope of the problem suggested that it is not limited to a single account or service.
Twitter shares fell by almost 4% in post-market trades.
Twitter said in an email that it is investigating the matter and that it would issue a statement shortly.
Some of the tweets were quickly removed, but there seemed to be difficult to regain control of the accounts.
In the case of Tesla’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, for example, a tweet requesting cryptocurrencies was removed and another appeared later.
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos and the corporate accounts of Uber and Apple were also affected.
A spokesperson for Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment and Tesla was unavailable to refer to the issue.
