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Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a two-hour outage on Saturday, pushing its owner Elon Musk to acknowledge the need to return his attention to his core businesses. The incident comes amid growing public scrutiny of Musk’s political involvement and as the entrepreneur signals a shift away from Washington.
In his post on X regarding the outage, Musk said the incident showed that "major operational improvements need to be made," and pointed out that the platform’s failover redundancy—the backup systems intended to ensure service continuity—"should have worked, but did not."
"Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms," he added.
The outage triggered renewed criticism over Musk's divided focus, as many users around the world reported service disruptions, according to Downdetector.
The SITE Intelligence Group reported that a hacker-activist collective named DieNet had claimed responsibility for the service disruption. The group described the incident as a "test" of its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) capabilities. In a DDoS attack, servers are flooded with excessive traffic, rendering them inaccessible to regular users.
Although full details remain unclear, the incident has heightened concern over the resilience of X’s infrastructure at a time when Musk is stretched thin across multiple ventures.
Musk currently holds leading roles in X, xAI (developer of the AI chatbot Grok), electric vehicle giant Tesla, and aerospace firm SpaceX. Despite this heavy workload, he had recently been involved in advising U.S. President Donald Trump, particularly in efforts aimed at slashing the size of the federal government.
Earlier this month, Musk began scaling down his presence in Washington, saying he was spending just "one or two days a week" at what has been informally dubbed the "Department of Government Efficiency." This followed growing backlash to government spending cuts and a corresponding decline in Tesla’s share price.
This week, he said he would scale back political spending, though he did not rule out supporting future causes "if I see a reason."
Still, Musk remains one of President Trump’s closest allies. He contributed more than $235 million to Trump’s campaign and reportedly joined an Oval Office meeting with the South African president on Wednesday.
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