Musk refocuses on X and Tesla after outage disrupts social network

Sunday 25 May 2025 - 11:04

By: Zahouani Ilham

Musk refocuses on X and Tesla after outage disrupts social network

A brief outage on the social media platform X over the weekend prompted its CEO, Elon Musk, to announce that he would shift his attention back to managing his businesses, stepping back from his involvement in Donald Trump's administration.

Musk, who already juggles leadership roles at X, the AI company xAI (developer of the chatbot Grok), Tesla, and SpaceX, has also been playing a significant role in Trump’s government in recent months. Tasked with slashing federal spending, Musk has been highly visible during the early days of Trump’s second presidency.

However, the outage on Saturday, which disrupted the X platform between 13:00 and 15:00 GMT, may have marked a turning point. Musk suggested this incident was a wake-up call and a reason to reassess his priorities.

"Back to working 24/7 and sleeping in conference rooms, server rooms, and factories," Musk posted on X shortly after the issue was resolved. "I must stay deeply focused on X, xAI, and Tesla, especially with the Starship launch coming next week. We have vital technologies to deploy. This week’s operational issues on X highlight the urgent need for significant improvements. The failover system should have worked but didn’t."

Monitoring service Site indicated the outage might have been caused by a cyberattack from the hacker group DieNet. The group reportedly carried out a "test" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and warned of a more powerful technology yet to come.