San Francisco - A mysterious team of hackers has managed to hijack the Twitter account of US president-elect Barack Obama along with celebrities like Britney Spears, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, Twitter confirmed Monday.

The security snafu on the trendy micro-blogging site came days after a successful "phishing" scheme tricked many users into providing their usernames and logons.

It is unclear whether the hacked accounts were a result of that scheme, but the results were undeniably embarrassing.

Obama's Twitter page, which was last used to deliver a quick victory message on election night, was updated to bring users to a survey site where they coud vie to win 500 dollars in free petrol.

The Twitter page of Spears referred to an intimate part of her body, which it said was "about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth." Sanchez told his fans that "I am high on crack right now might not be coming into work today" while conservative O'Reilly proclaimed that he was gay.

In a blog posting, Twitter said that 33 high profile accounts had been compromised by an individual who hacked into support tools used to help account holders remember their passwords.

"We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack and others are now back in control of their accounts," the company said. "We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline." (dpa)