Social media platform X on Saturday was hit by a two-hour outage, prompting owner Elon Musk to say he needs to spend more time focusing on his companies.
His statement echoed comments earlier this month suggesting he would reduce his role in US President Donald Trump’s administration.
The world’s richest person has an extraordinarily full plate as owner and CEO of X, xAI (developer of the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Grok), electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc and rocket builder Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) — not to mention his recent polarizing efforts to help Trump slash the size of the US federal government.
Photo: AP
As backlash to those cuts grew and Tesla share prices slipped, Musk began drawing away from the government role, confirming last week that he was down to one or two days a week at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Still, the man who contributed more than US$235 million to Trump’s election campaign remains a close adviser to the US president, attending an Oval Office meeting with the South African president on Wednesday.
After the X outage, Musk suggested that he might have been away from his companies for too long.
“As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he said. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
X had largely returned to normal service by 11am on Saturday.
The SITE Intelligence Group reported that hacker-activist group DieNet had claimed responsibility for the outage.
DieNet had called the attack a “test” of its distributed denial of service capabilities — flooding the system with online traffic to make it inaccessible to legitimate users, SITE said.
“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” Musk wrote on X. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
SpaceX on Friday announced that it next week plans to attempt a new launch of its megarocket Starship.
Still under development, Starship exploded in flight during two previous launches.
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