Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. News

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

By

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.

Recommended Videos

“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.”

Related

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.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
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.” 
Dorsey explains that although he will continue to serve on the board until the end of his term next spring, as of today, he is officially handing over the reins of CEO to Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal, as confirmed by the company’s board of directors. The board also named Bret Taylor as the new chairman of the board, He will succeed Patrick Pichette in that role. 
In his internal email, Dorsey also shared that he has no plans to remain on the board after his term expires, as he feels “it’s really important to give Parag the space he needs to lead.” 
Dorsey says that he’s leaving because he feels it’s best to separate a company from its founders, and that now is the right time to do so. “I believe it’s critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder’s influence or direction,” Dorsey said in the message to Twitter employees. 
Based on the message, it appears that Dorsey has been planning this for a while. He noted that he’s been working hard “to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.” It’s just been a matter of finding the right person to take over the helm, and Dorsey had been grooming Agrawal for some time, due to “how deeply he understands the company and its needs.”
“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. 

Read more
Major Twitter hack in 2020 results in another arrest
A lot of white Twitter logos against a blue background.

Police in Spain have arrested a 22-year-old British man in connection with a major Twitter hack last year that targeted high-profile accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam.

Joseph O’Connor was picked up by police in the resort town of Estepona about 280 miles south of Madrid following a request by the U.S. authorities to detain the alleged hacker, the Department of Justice (DoJ) revealed on Wednesday, July 21. O’Connor’s detention follows other arrests made last year in connection with the case.

Read more
Twitter for web returns after major outage on Wednesday
A lot of white Twitter logos against a blue background.

Twitter for web experienced serious service issues around the world for several hours on Wednesday evening, preventing users from viewing tweets and other content. The problem started at around 10 p.m. ET and took nearly three hours for the company to fix.  Twitter's mobile app appeared to be unaffected.

Twitter Support acknowledged the issue at 10:52 p.m. ET, saying: "Profiles’ tweets may not be loading for some of you on web and we’re currently working on a fix. Thanks for sticking with us!"

Read more