On Saturday, May 24th, a major outage occurred on the social platform X owned by billionaire Elon Musk, affecting tens of thousands of users, including those in the United States. Musk later responded that he had returned to his previous round-the-clock work status.
Musk posted on X, stating, “As demonstrated by the service interruption this week, we need to make significant improvements in our operations.” He added, “Backup systems should have been activated, but they did not work as expected.”
According to Downdetector statistics, the outage peaked at 8:51 am Eastern Time (12:51 GMT), with over 25,800 reported incidents. The platform aggregates reports from users and various sources to track service status. By 12:09 pm, the number of reports had dropped to below 650.
The outage issue seemed to have been mostly resolved around 10 am, but some users experienced intermittent disruptions around 11 am. This is the second major abnormality on the platform within a week. On Thursday, May 22nd, X also experienced an outage, during which users were unable to log in or load content.
In his post on Saturday, Musk also mentioned returning to “round-the-clock work mode, sleeping in meeting rooms, server rooms, or factories.” He emphasized the need to “fully focus on X, xAI, and Tesla along with next week’s launch of the interstellar spacecraft, as we are about to introduce key technologies.”
During the peak of the Saturday outage, thousands of users in countries including Germany, Spain, France, India, Canada, Australia, and the UK, besides the US, reported issues logging in or using the X platform, as reported by Reuters.
Currently, Musk leads Tesla, SpaceX, and the artificial intelligence company xAI. Last year, he invested nearly $300 million to support former President Donald Trump and other Republicans. However, earlier this week, he stated his intention to significantly reduce political donations, with a focus returning to the business sector.
Previously, he headed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which advocated for cutting tens of thousands of government employees and eliminating large contracts and subsidies. However, his political stance has sparked protests in the US and Europe, affecting Tesla sales and resulting in the first decline in annual deliveries last year.