The mass warnings from Twitter also provoked concern among journalists and activists in China, who feared a link to the ongoing 18th Party Congress.
In a blog post this afternoon, Twitter admitted it had reset passwords by accident.
“In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised,†it said.
“We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused.â€
Attempts to hack Twitter accounts are common, and most commonly carried out by spammers who want to use the service to spread links to scam pharmacies or pages carrying comuter viruses.
"In instances when we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password," Twitter explained.
"This is a routine part of our processes to protect our users."
The apparent problems with this process are a setback for Twitter, which has steadily built up a reputation for technical competence over the last two years, after initially struggling to cope with its rapid growth and suffering embarrassing outages.
Its “fail whale†page, displayed when the service is unavailable due to technical problems, has become a much rarer sight. After the US election this week, when Twitter remained online throughout despite the heavy load on it, the firm’s creative director Doug Bowman announced “RIP, Fail Whale†on his account.
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