The company said that the site should be working for everyone within the next few hours and that it did not have any evidence of a security breach or a hack.
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed more than 55,000 users were facing issues with Twitter.
In July, Twitter reported a breach where hackers accessed its internal systems to hijack some of the platform's top voices, including US presidential candidate Joe Biden and reality TV star Kim Kardashian, and used them to solicit digital currency.
Most of you should be back to Tweeting. The outage was caused by a system change initiated earlier then planned, affecting most of our servers. We’re working hard to bring Twitter back to normal and expect things to be fully resolved in 1-2 hours. We appreciate your patience.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 16, 2020
The mysterious tweets were marked by a similar message, asking people to donate Bitcoins, promising double returns. A post from Bill Gates' account read, “Everyone is asking me to give back. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000.” A similar message was posted from several other prominent accounts as well, specifying that the double return offer would last for 30 minutes. All such tweets has since been removed.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a probe following the hack of celebrity Twitter accounts. The alleged scam reportedly stole more than $1,18,000 in Bitcoin. Florida prosecutors said Graham Ivan Clark was the mastermind behind the hack, and charged the 17-year-old Tampa resident as an adult with 30 felonies.
Clark has pleaded not guilty. Federal prosecutors charged two others with aiding the hack.
© Reuters