Taylor Swift says Twitter, Instagram accounts were hacked
Pop star Taylor Swift said her Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked on Tuesday, but the rogue posts were quickly removed from the social media services.
The 25-year-old Shake It Off singer, whose album 1989 has been atop the charts for the past three months, has built a following of young fans through social media and has the fourth-most popular Twitter account with 51.4 million followers.
"My Twitter got hacked but don’t worry, Twitter is deleting the hacker tweets and locking my account until they can figure out how this happened and get me new passwords," said a statement posted on Swift’s personal Tumblr page.
"Never a dull moment," the statement added before another posting said that Swift’s Instagram account had been hacked as well.
Celebrities are frequent targets of hackers who have posted personal and embarrassing information online in previous high-profile hacks.
Swift’s publicist did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc-owned Instagram did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether Swift’s accounts had been hacked.
The Grammy winner was back to tweeting two hours after the hacking, in which users were asked to follow two accounts that Twitter now lists as suspended.
Swift had a little fun with the incident, mimicking the lyrics to her hit Shake It Off.
The apparent hacking of Swift’s accounts came as Facebook, the world’s largest social network, experienced a wide outage on Tuesday. A hacker group sought to claim responsibility, but the company said the outage was its fault.