Biden, billionaires and corporate accounts appear to be targeted in Twitter bitcoin hack

Accounts for former president Barack Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, musician Kanye West and both Uber and Apple also posted similar tweets, all instructing people to send cryptocurrency to the same bitcoin address. The tweets were removed throughout the afternoon shortly after being posted to the accounts.

Twitter said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon that some users weren't able to tweet while it was working on the incident, and users with the checkmark to indicate their accounts were verified by the social media company reported they weren't able to tweet.

Twitter spokeswoman Aly Pavela said earlier that the company was investigating. The company said in an earlier tweet it was "taking steps to fix" the security incident and would provide an update shortly.

While it was unclear how the attacks originated or why they kept going, some cyber security experts speculated that someone may have gained access to internal Twitter controls that allowed them to take over accounts and post on their behalf. 

Some of the people who were hacked specified they had turned on two-factor authentication and were using strong passwords, which typically makes any account more difficult to break into.

A now-deleted tweet from Tesla CEO Musk's account said, "Feeling greatful, 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."

His account continued to tweet similar posts as they were deleted. New tweets that appeared to be hackers were still being posted more than an hour after Musk's account first tweeted the scam message.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was also a target of the hack, his campaign confirmed. His account apparently tweeted out the same bitcoin wallet address.

"This is a SCAM, DO NOT participate!" Cameron Winklevoss, a bitcoin investor and co-founder of Gemini.

Gemini's account was hacked earlier in the day, Winklevoss tweeted, despite the account using two-factor authentication to secure it.

Amazon chief executive and Washington Post owner Bezos' account tweeted, "I have decided to give back to my community." The tweet said it would be limited to $50 million.

The bitcoin wallet the tweets pointed to appeared to receive more than $115,000. It's unclear how much of that was driven by the hacked tweets and what may have originated from the scammers.

Apple's and Uber's corporate accounts also appear to have fallen victim to the hack. Uber posted a tweet that read, "Due to Covid-19, we are giving back over $10,000,000 in Bitcoin! All payments sent to our address below will be sent back doubled."

Uber confirmed in a tweet that its account had been hacked.

"Like many others, our @Uber account was hit by a scammer today. The tweet has been deleted and we're working directly with @Twitter to figure out what happened," the company's communication team tweeted.

Gates spokesperson Bridgitt Arnold confirmed the tweet was not sent by Gates, and said Twitter was working to restore his account.

Representatives for Musk, Bezos and Biden did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.