The social media platform X -formerly Twitter- experienced an outage for two hours yesterday, Saturday, prompting its owner Elon Musk to say he needs to allocate more time to manage his companies.
His statement was in line with his previous announcement this month that he would reduce his role in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The world's richest man is suffering from an extremely busy schedule, as he is the owner and CEO of X, X AI (the developer of the Grok AI chatbot), the electric car company Tesla, and the rocket manufacturing company SpaceX, along with his recent controversial efforts to help Trump downsize the U.S. federal government.
As negative reactions to this government cutback increased and Tesla's stock declined, Musk began to withdraw from his government role, confirming last week that his federal work 'will be limited to one or two days a week' in what he called the 'Department of Government Efficiency.'
Nevertheless, the man who contributed over $235 million to Trump's election campaign remains a close advisor to the U.S. president, having attended a meeting in the Oval Office with the South African president last Wednesday.
After the X service outage on Saturday, Musk hinted that he may have 'been absent from his companies for too long.'
'As evident from X's issues this week, there is a need for significant operational improvements,' he added. 'The backup recovery system was supposed to work, but it didn't.'
The X service was back up and running by 11:00 AM Eastern Time (15:00 GMT) after two hours of downtime yesterday, Saturday.
Hackers
The DieNet group, a collective of active hackers, claimed responsibility for the outage.
DieNet described the attack as a 'test' of its capabilities for so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which are carried out by flooding platforms and websites with high traffic and a stream of irrelevant data online, making it impossible for real users to access the platforms.
Intense focus
'I’m back to working around the clock and sleeping in meeting rooms or servers or factories,' Musk posted on the X platform. 'I need to be extremely focused on Tesla, X, and X AI, in addition to overseeing the launch of Starship next week.'
SpaceX announced on Friday that it plans to attempt to launch its giant rocket (Starship) next week, after it exploded during its previous two launches.
Starship is a key element in Musk's long-term plans to colonize Mars, and SpaceX has bet on launching several prototypes of Starship, despite catastrophic failures, to quickly identify and address issues.
Political divorce?
The billionaire born in South Africa has long indicated that he will reduce his political role to refocus on his businesses.
Earlier this month, Musk acknowledged that his ambitious efforts to reduce U.S. federal spending have not fully met their goals, despite laying off tens of thousands of employees and significant budget cuts.
This week, Musk stated that he would scale back his spending on political affairs, although he did not rule out supporting future causes 'if he sees a justification for it.' Regarding his recent political donations, he said, 'I did what I had to do.'