Kim Kardashian West, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama were all 'hacked' Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are among many prominent US figures targeted by hackers on Twitter in an apparent Bitcoin scam. The official accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kanye West also requested donations in the cryptocurrency. "Everyone is asking me to give back," a tweet from Mr Gates' account said. "You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000." The US Senate Commerce committee has demanded Twitter brief it about the incident next week. Twitter said it was a "co-ordinated" attack targeting its employees "with access to internal systems and tools". "We know they [the hackers] used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf," the company said in a series of tweets. It added that "significant steps" had been taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company's investigation was ongoing. The firm has also blocked users from being able to tweet Bitcoin wallet addresses for the time being. Meanwhile, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted: "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened." The UK's National Cyber Security Centre said its officers had "reached out" to the tech firm. "While this appears to be an attack on the company rather than individual users, we would urge people to treat requests for money or sensitive information on social media with extreme caution," it added in a statement. US politicians also have questions. Republican Senator Josh Hawley has written to the company asking if President Trump's account had been vulnerable. President Trump's account was not compromised, the White House said. "The president will remain on Twitter. His account was secure and not jeopardised during these attacks," a statement said. The chair of the Senate Commerce committee has also been in contact with Twitter. "It cannot be overstated how troubling this incident is, both in its effects and in the apparent failure of Twitter's internal controls to prevent it," Senator Roger Wicker wrote to the firm. He added that the company must brief the committee's staff about the hack no later than Thursday 23 July. One cyber-security expert said that the breach could have been a lot worse in other circumstances. "If you were to have this kind of incident take place in the middle of a crisis, where Twitter was being used to either communicate de-escalatory language or critical information to the public, and suddenly it's putting out the wrong messages from several verified status accounts - that could be seriously destabilising," Dr Alexi Drew from King's College London told the BBC. Emergency response Twitter earlier had to take the extraordinary step of stopping many verified accounts marked with blue ticks from tweeting altogether. Password reset requests were also being denied and some other "account functions" disabled. By 20:30 EDT (00:30 GMT Thursday) users with verified account started to be able to send tweets again, but Twitter said it was still working on a fix. Allow Twitter content? This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy