The social media platform X was affected by a two-hour outage. This prompted its owner, Elon Musk, to say that he needed to devote more time to his companies, AFP reported.

The billionaire has an extremely busy schedule as owner/CEO of X, xAI (developer of the AI-powered chatbot Grok), electric car manufacturer Tesla, and rocket manufacturer SpaceX—accompanied by his latest polarizing efforts to help Donald Trump cut thousands of jobs in the US government.

With the negative reaction to the layoffs growing and Tesla's stock price falling, Musk began to step back from his government roles and return to his original work.

On May 24, after the X outage, he hinted that he may have been away too long.

“As the problems with X this week have shown, significant operational improvements are needed,” he said.

“I'm going back to 24-hour workdays and sleeping in conference rooms, server rooms, and factories,” the businessman wrote on X.

“I need to be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus the Starship launch next week) as we have critical technologies being deployed.”

Regarding the X outage, he said, “The backup switching system should have worked, but it didn't.”

X returned to largely normal operation at 11:00 a.m. (local time).

SpaceX announced on May 23 that it plans to make another attempt to launch its Starship mega-rocket next week. Starship, which is still in development, exploded during two previous launches.

Earlier this month, Musk acknowledged that his ambitious efforts to cut federal spending in the US, led by his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had not fully achieved their goals, despite tens of thousands of job cuts and drastic budget cuts. | BGNES