AP Twitter hack
Impact
$136B round-trip in 4 minutes
What happened
Hackers took control of the Associated Press's verified Twitter account and posted 'Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.' The Dow fell 143 points in three minutes before AP denied it. $136 billion of market value evaporated and returned inside four minutes.
Context
The AP hack proved that algorithmic trading systems were scanning Twitter as a news source and had no reliable way to distinguish a real AP alert from a compromised one. SEC guidance on social media disclosure tightened later that year.
Era
05 · Twitter & Crypto Influencers
A single Musk tweet could move Bitcoin 15% before most people read it. Algorithms scraped Twitter in real-time and executed trades faster than human cognition.
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