After brief X outage, Musk says he's refocusing on business

(Patria) - Social media platform X suffered a two-hour outage on Saturday, prompting owner Elon Musk to say he needs to devote more time to focusing on his companies, reports AFP.

His statement echoed comments made earlier this month suggesting he would reduce his role in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The world's richest person has his hands full as owner/CEO of X, xAI
(developer of the AI-powered chatbot Grok), electric car maker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX, as well as his efforts to help Trump shrink the size of the U.S. federal government.

As backlash to those cuts grew and Tesla's stock price fell, Musk began to distance himself from the government role, confirming last week that he is down to one or two days a week at the so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE).

Still, the man who contributed more than $235 million to Trump's campaign remains a close advisor, attending an Oval Office meeting with the South African president on Wednesday.

After the X system outage on Saturday, Musk suggested he may have been away from his companies for too long.

"As demonstrated by this week's X system issues, major operational improvements are needed," he said.

"Failover redundancy should have worked, but it didn't."

X was largely back to normal operation by 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday.

The SITE Intelligence Group reported that the hacktivist group DieNet claimed
responsibility for the outage. DieNet, it said, called the attack a "test" of its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) capabilities - flooding a system with online traffic to make it unavailable to legitimate users.

Super focused

"I'm back to working 24/7 and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms," Musk posted on X.

"I need to be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus the Starship launch next week), as we are introducing critical technologies."

SpaceX announced on Friday it plans to attempt another launch of its mega-rocket Starship next week. Starship, which is under development, exploded in flight during two previous launches.

Starship is key to Musk's long-term plans for colonizing Mars, and SpaceX is betting on launching numerous Starship prototypes, despite explosive failures, to quickly identify and fix problems.

The South African-born billionaire has been signaling for weeks that he will reduce his political role to refocus on his business.

Earlier this month, Musk acknowledged that his ambitious effort to cut U.S. federal spending has not fully achieved its goals, despite tens of thousands of layoffs and drastic budget cuts.

This week, he said he would step back from spending his wealth on politics, though he did not rule out supporting future causes "if I see a reason to."

Of his recent political donations, he said: "I did what needed to be done."