What you need to know

  • Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, had his account hacked.
  • Twitter says it's "investigating what happened."
  • The breach appears to have been done via an SMS service called Cloudhopper.

If you've been on Twitter this afternoon, chances are you've seen something about Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's account being compromised.

Dorsey's account (@Jack) began tweeting random tweets on August 30, many of which were racial slurs and Nazi propaganda. The tweets were being shared with Jack's 4.2 million followers for about 20 minutes, and at the time of publishing this article, they all appear to have been deleted.

It's still unclear what exactly caused the incident, but it seems to revolve around a service called "Cloudhopper."

Cloudhopper is an SMS platform that was purchased by Twitter back in 2010, and it's worth mentioning because all of the rouge tweets coming from Jack's account were sent via Cloudhopper. As such, Jack's actual Twitter account wasn't breached — his account's connection to Cloudhopper likely was.

Twitter sent out a tweet at 4:05 PM saying that it was "investigating what happened" to Jack's account, but that's all the company's said on the matter so far.

Save 40% and get three months of wireless service for just $45

While this is more of an issue with Cloudhopper and third-party authorization, it's still not a good look for Twitter in the slightest.

How to change your Twitter password and activate two-factor authentication