In a major Twitter server hack, claimed to be carried out by group affiliated to infamous hacktivist organization called "Anonymous", details of 55,000 Twitter accounts has been leaked online. However, nearly half of those accounts appear to be duplicate and majority belongs to accounts that have been suspended by Twitter in the past.

Possibly the hack has been carried out between May 5 to May 7. Reportedly, Twitter was temporarily offline for over an hour on Saturday, which was attributed to an internal error. The hacked data was posted on Pastebin.com by an anonymous guest user on May 7.

The hack was first reported by Airdemon - a hacking news site - on Tuesday claiming that among the hacked account were several verified celebrity accounts. Airdemon aggregated the news claiming that a Twitter Insider has verified the hack.

According to Twitter, more than 20,000 accounts that have been exposed online are duplicate. A majority of accounts which are not fake have been associated with spam accounts that had been suspended by the company in past. While many online pasted accounts do have correct usernames, but wrong passwords.

 "We are currently looking into the situation. In the meantime, we have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected. For those who are concerned that their account may have been compromised, we suggest resetting your passwords...," said a Twitter spokesperson in an e-mail.

Twitter is trying to keep the figures as low as possible. But in reality, many Twitter accounts that have been hacked and pasted online are real. And one of them could be yours. The information has been posted on pastebin.com in five documents. The documents can be accessed here - Document 1, Document 2, Document 3, Document 4, Document 5.

The user names have been listed alphabetically. So it is easy to check whether your account is listed in the documents or not. Otherwise you can also use the in-built word search tool to find it out. On the other hand, we strongly recommend you to change your account password, even if it is not present in the hacked and pasted ones. Maybe there could also be another secret list preserved for future chaos, who knows?

(reported by Johnny Wills, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)