Twitter accounts belonging to Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, among other notable Americans, were hacked yesterday, Wednesday, July 15th, 2020.

Other accounts hacked are those belonging to Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezoz, and Mike Bloomberg.

The accounts of these prominent persons posted tweets soliciting donations via Bitcoin to their verified profiles.

A tweet from Bill Gates verified Twitter handle reads; “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back.”

Another tweet from former President of the US reads; “I am giving back to my community due to COVID-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000!”

Twitter’s support account however responded via a tweet saying; “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.

“We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter. We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.’’

An hour after that, Twitter prevented its verified users from tweeting while unverified accounts could still tweet.

"You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident," Twitter's support account said.

Around 8,30pm, Twitter said they were fixing the problem and most accounts should be able to tweet again.

"Most accounts should be able to Tweet again. As we continue working on a fix, this functionality may come and go.We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible," Twitter said.

“We all feel terrible this happened, we are diagnosing and will share everything when we have a more complete understanding of what happened,’’ Twitter Founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey said.

Recall that in August 2019, Jack Dorsey had his account hacked.

This has raised concerns about whether any account on the social media platform is safe..

"We can confirm that Bill Gates did not send this tweet, this appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account," a spokesperson for Gates told CNN Business.

Asked whether it was concerned about the President's account potentially being affected, or whether it was in touch with Twitter about the issue, the White House declined to comment.