Twitter has scrambled to respond to a damning hack.

During last week, a series of high-profile Twitter accounts were hijacked and used to scam readers into donating bitcoin.

Tweets were seemingly posted by some of the platform's top voices including US presidential candidate Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, billionaire Elon Musk, rapper Kanye West, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.

Shares in the social media company tumbled almost 5 per cent on the day of the hack.

Blockchain records show the scammers received over $US100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

The FBI's San Francisco division is leading an inquiry into the attack.

Twitter released a statement saying “the attackers successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter’s internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections”.

“As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts,” Twitter wrote.

“For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets.”

Security experts say it will not be known for several weeks just how deep the breach was.