Billionaire Elon Musk has pledged to devote more attention to his companies following a two-hour outage on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend. The disruption prompted Musk to admit he may have been too distracted from critical business operations. While X has not confirmed the exact reason for the outage, Musk has confirmed that he is coming back to work around the clock to enhance the platform’s performance. His remarks came shortly after X experienced significant service disruptions, affecting users globally and prompting renewed scrutiny of the platform’s infrastructure and resilience. Let’s break it down, here’s the full story in 5 points.
Elon Musk vowed to work 24/7: Story in 5 points
— Elon Musk’s social media platform X suffered a widespread outage on Saturday, 24 May 2025, leaving users across the globe unable to access the app or website for nearly two hours. According to Downdetector, an independent website that tracks internet service disruptions, user complaints surged to over 2,200 by 6:20PM IST, indicating the scale of the disruption. The outage affected users in multiple regions, with reports citing login failures, feed-loading issues, and complete inaccessibility on both mobile and desktop versions of the platform.
— Right after X was down, X’s official engineering team confirmed the disruption on the platform, attributing the issue to a data centre failure. In a statement shared on the platform, the account posted: “X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today.”
It went on to clarify the cause of the problem, saying: “We are experiencing a data centre outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.” Meanwhile, according to the Wired report, citing anonymous sources, the recent outage on X was triggered by a fire at a data centre located in Hillsboro, Oregon. The facility, which is leased by X, reportedly required emergency services to respond and contain the blaze.
— Musk responded to the outage by announcing a return to round-the-clock engagement with his ventures. “Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” he posted on X. “I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
— His renewed commitment to his businesses follows a period of intense political activity, during which Musk took on an informal advisory role in US President Donald Trump’s administration. He also helped establish the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” aimed at slashing federal spending — a campaign that resulted in sweeping job cuts and considerable public backlash.
— In March 2025, Elon Musk alleged that his social media platform X was the target of a “massive cyberattack”, following a wave of outages that left thousands of users unable to access the service. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing,” Musk wrote in a post on the platform.