Emergency response
Twitter earlier had to take the extraordinary step of stopping 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." On the official account of Mr Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief appeared to offer to double any Bitcoin payment sent to the address of his digital wallet "for the next 30 minutes". "I'm feeling generous because of Covid-19," the tweet added, along with a Bitcoin link address. The tweets were deleted just minutes after they were first posted. But as the first such tweet from Musk's account was removed, another one appeared, then a third. Others targeted included:- the rapper Kanye West
- reality TV star Kim Kardashian
- 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
- the iPhone-maker Apple