Twitter Locks Verified Accounts After Hackers Target Prominent Users

In response to hackers targeting prominent accounts belonging to Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, and others, Twitter — as users immediately noticed — locked verified accounts.

As of this posting, Twitter is mostly just unverified users (a.k.a. users without the “blue checkmark”) mocking the disappearance of verified accounts. Verified accounts can still retweet posts, but cannot post on their own.

For example:

The fact that so many prominent accounts were targeted is an incredibly serious security issue. Twitter support said earlier tonight, “We’re continuing to limit the ability to Tweet, reset your password, and some other account functionalities while we look into this. Thanks for your patience.”

While verified accounts have been locked, some reporters have gone to backup accounts that haven’t been verified to continue tweeting, like NBC News’ Ben Collins:

Hi everyone! It's Ben Collins from NBC. I'll be tweeting from here for the time being while verified users aren't allowed to tweet.

— Ben Collins (@BenCollinsNBC) July 15, 2020

Some fellow unverified NBC accounts that the proletariat has given permission to tweet at this time:@TempNBCNews (official NBC News account backup)@hiitsmedave (Dave Ingram)@KaplanEzra (Ezra Kaplan)@amcovarrubias (Amanda Covarrubias)

— Ben Collins (@BenCollinsNBC) July 15, 2020