Twitter releases statement about crypto scam hack, saying high-profile users affected are still locked out

Twitter has released an official statement on the hack that saw some of the biggest accounts on the platform pushing a bitcoin scam.

On Wednesday, verified accounts including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, and Kanye West were hacked to tweet links to a bitcoin address, promising that anyone who transferred BTC would have multiples of that amount sent back. 

Verified accounts were prevented from tweeting (though not from retweeting) for over two hours while Twitter sought to secure the breaches, to the amusement of unverified users.

Just after 7.30 p.m. PT, Twitter released the following statement via a thread by its official @TwitterSupport account:

Our investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far: 

We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools