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.”

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” were taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company’s investigation was ongoing.

Meanwhile, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted : “Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened.”

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.