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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey calls it a ‘tough day’ after major hack

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it had been a “tough day” for the team after numerous high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked in a Bitcoin scam on Wednesday, July 15.

“Tough day for us at Twitter,” Dorsey said in a tweet posted at 6.20 p.m. PT, just a few hours after the security breach took place, adding, “We all feel terrible this happened.”

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The Twitter boss said his team is now trying to establish precisely how it occurred, and promised to “share everything we can” once the investigating team has more information.

Dozens of high-profile accounts were hit in the scam, with each one posting a message that offered to pay a sender double any payment they made to a Bitcoin wallet address included in the tweet. According to Blockchain.com data, more than $100,000 had been sent to the Bitcoin wallet via more than 370 transactions as of early Wednesday evening.

Digital Trends

Former President Barack Obama and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, were among the hacked accounts. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, entertainer Kanye West, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg were also targeted, as were tech firms such as Apple and Uber.

After Twitter noticed the hack, it temporarily halted the ability for verified accounts to tweet until it could be sure it was on top of the situation. Operations have now returned to normal.

In the meantime, Twitter is trying to work out how the hack took place so that it can stop it from happening again. We’ve reached out to the company for more information and will update this piece when we hear back.

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Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Jack Dorsey resigns as CEO of Twitter, hands reins to CTO Parag Agrawal
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter

It looks like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is leaving the chief executive's office once again — but this time, it's by choice.
Sources within Twitter first shared the news with CNBC earlier this morning, and it’s now been confirmed by Dorsey himself — quite appropriately via a Tweet on his social media platform. 
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=21
While the original reports didn’t have much to say about why Dorsey was stepping down, or when it would be happening, it didn’t take long for the erstwhile CEO to share the news himself. In his tweet, Dorsey includes a screenshot of the email that he sent internally to Twitter employees, describing it as part of his desire for Twitter “to be the most transparent company ever.” 
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“Parag has been behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around. He’s curious, probing, rationale relative, demanding, self-aware, and humble. He leads with heart and soul, and is something I learn from daily. My trust in him as our CEO is bone deep,” Dorsey told employees in the internal email.

Dorsey's past with Twitter has been marred by controversies
Over the years, Dorsey has had a somewhat tumultuous relationship with the company that he helped to create in 2006. He initially served as CEO until 2008, but was pushed out of the role after his co-founder Evan Williams and the board felt that he was unfit to lead the growing social media company. 
While Dorsey remained with Twitter as chairman of the board, he refocused most of his attention elsewhere, forming the popular mobile payment company Square. Once that was up and running, Dorsey rejoined Twitter in early 2011 to focus on product development, dividing his time between that and his ongoing work at Square. 
After four more years of struggling to come up with a long-term vision, Twitter’s board returned Dorsey to the position of permanent CEO of Twitter in fall 2015, replacing Dick Costolo, who had taken over from Williams in 2010.
During Dorsey’s second tenure, he’s presided over a social network that’s faced some significantly new and different challenges. 

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