Microsoft’s official X account, which has over 13 million followers, was hijacked on Thursday and used to promote a Clippy-themed crypto token. The company has confirmed the unauthorized access, removed the posts, and says it’s investigating.
If you were on X on Thursday, you might have seen Microsoft’s official account follow a Clippy-themed account, repost its plea to bring the old Office assistant back, and reportedly even swap its profile picture for Clippy. The posts disappeared soon after, and so did a strange “apology” that showed up around 30 minutes later.
Funnily enough, in the middle of a crypto scam, the internet got what it always wants from Microsoft: another chance to ask for Clippy.
Microsoft got hacked, and Clippy became the bait
The account Microsoft followed was @clippymsftcto, which had posted a picture of Clippy in front of the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper, asking “HOW MANY LIKES TO BRING CLIPPY BACK??” The hijacked Microsoft account quoted it with, “500,000 likes and we bring Clippy back. The ball is in your court.”
Of course, this wasn’t a real offer from Microsoft. The Clippy account has since been suspended, but another Clippy account kept promoting a $Clippy token and claiming it “has a liquidity pool paired directly with $MSFT.” The claim came from the token’s promoters, and Microsoft’s stock has nothing to do with it.
The deleted “apology” on the Microsoft account said the company doesn’t support, endorse, or authorize any cryptocurrency token linked to Clippy, Microsoft, or $MSFT, and that it would pursue legal action to have the token and related material removed. However, the wording here is quite unnatural and doesn’t really sound like it was written by Microsoft.
Either way, the scammers picked the right bait, because people really miss Clippy. When Satya Nadella posted about building Copilot as a new OS for work on September 25, one of the replies simply said, “Can you just stop and bring back clippy at this point.”
Clippy debuted as the default Office Assistant in Office 97, and Microsoft themselves poked fun at him when Office XP turned him off by default in 2001. Office 2007 dropped Clippy completely, but years of Microsoft Easter eggs and jokes turned the paperclip into a nostalgia icon.
Ironically, Clippy became famous for interrupting people with advice they didn’t ask for, and in 2026, someone used him to interrupt Microsoft’s newer interruption using Copilot.
Microsoft says AI can find scammers, but maybe it should secure its own accounts first
Just last month, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit disrupted EvilTokens, an AI-powered cybercrime service linked to over 12,000 compromised inboxes across more than 10,000 organizations. Microsoft has also warned that attackers are using AI to exploit Windows 11 bugs within hours, and it patched a record 570 Windows flaws in July as AI finds bugs faster.
So, Microsoft can take down AI crime platforms, yet someone still got the keys to its official X account and turned Clippy into crypto bait.
To be fair, these are different security problems, as Microsoft’s threat intelligence doesn’t run its social media, and the company hasn’t said how the attackers got in. It isn’t the first time either, since the Microsoft India account on X was hijacked for a crypto scam in 2024.
Maybe Microsoft should bring Clippy back, since it’s one of the few things people seem to agree on. But a mascot won’t fix the bigger problem, which is trust, or the lack of it.
Microsoft has spent 2026 promising a better Windows, and many of those improvements are live. Yet in September, we saw a Windows 11 update breaking multiple features and another that quietly stopped backing up your files, while Microsoft kept confusing people about which X account to follow for Copilot updates.
The goal shouldn’t be bringing back Clippy. It should be to make products that people would remember years later with a certain nostalgia attached to it. And right now, neither Windows 11, nor Copilot has those traits.
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