(GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

Hackers gained access to the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and many others Wednesday afternoon in an apparent cryptocurrency giveaway scam. Other accounts including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Apple, Uber, and Square’s CashApp were also hacked.

Update, 2:45 p.m. PT: Here’s the first statement from Twitter:

Update, 9:25 p.m. PT: Twitter provided more details about the “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”

And here’s a message from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey:

Original story: The tweet below was posted from Gates’ account at 1:34 p.m. PT, but was then deleted. The same tweet from Gates appeared at 1:48 p.m. PT.

“We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates,” a spokesperson for Bill Gates told GeekWire. “This appears to be part of a larger issue that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and working to restore the account.”

A tweet from Musk was sent out just before 1:30 p.m. PT and was also deleted, before another appeared at 1:50 p.m. PT. Update: Another similar tweet appeared at 2:19 p.m. PT.

Biden, Obama, and Bezos were also hacked:

Here are the tweets from Apple and Uber’s accounts:

Uber responded with this:

More than $100,000 had been funneled to the bitcoin address included in the tweets.

Even those with two-factor authentication reported having their accounts compromised.

Twitter stock was down more than 3% in after-hours trading.

The Verge noted that Musk has been targeted by bitcoin scammers in the past.

Update, 3:18 p.m. PT: Twitter appeared to disable verified accounts as part of its response to the hacking.

Here is more commentary from others:

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