Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Obama and Bill Gates are among the several prominent US figures whose Twitter accounts were targeted by hackers in a shocking Bitcoin scam.
The official Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Apple and even Twitter Support were also hacked to request bitcoin donations a few hours ago.
Twitter said it was a "co-ordinated" attack targeting its employees "with access to internal systems and tools".
"We know they [the hackers] used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf," the company said in a series of tweets.
It added that "significant steps" were taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company's investigation was ongoing.
Twitter earlier eventually had to stop many verified accounts marked with blue ticks from tweeting altogether.
Password reset requests were also being denied and some other "account functions" disabled.
By 20:30 EDT (00:30 GMT Thursday) users with verified account started to be able to send tweets again, but Twitter said it was still working on a fix.
Dmitri Alperovitch, who co-founded cyber-security company CrowdStrike, told Reuters news agency: "This appears to be the worst hack of a major social media platform yet."
The tweets were deleted just minutes after they were first posted.
Others targeted included musician Kanye West, reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, former US President Obama, former US Vice-President Joe Biden, who is the current Democratic presidential candidate, media billionaire Mike Bloomberg, the ride-sharing app Uber, and the iPhone-maker Apple.
In the short time it was online, the link displayed in the tweets of targeted accounts received hundreds of contributions totalling more than $100,000 (£80,000), according to publicly available blockchain records. In any case, the real identities of the perpetrators are as yet unknown. All the targeted Twitter accounts targeted all have millions of followers.
