Musk cuts time at Doge to focus on his companies

Bengaluru — Elon Musk’s social media platform X was largely restored for most users after an outage that affected tens of thousands of users in the US on Saturday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, after which he said that he is “back to spending 24/7" at his companies.

At its midmorning peak , there were more than 25,800 incidents of people reporting issues with the social media platform, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including users.

“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms. I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus the Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out,” Musk said in an X post.

Thousands of users in other countries, such as Germany, Spain, France, India, Canada, Australia and Britain, also experienced issues with accessing the social media platform at the height of the outage, according to Downdetector data.

X did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the outage.

Investor concerns

Musk, who spent nearly $300m to back US President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other Republicans last year, said on Tuesday he will cut his political spending substantially, signalling that he is shifting his attention back to his business empire amid growing investor concerns.

He led the department of government efficiency (Doge), which sought to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and cancel billions of dollars in contracts and grants.

However, his political views triggered waves of protests against Tesla in the US and Europe, leading to a slump in sales, with the automaker reporting its first drop in annual deliveries last year.

The amount of time Musk has spent at Tesla has concerned some investors. Looking to ease those worries, Musk told investors last month he would reduce his time with Doge to a day or two a week from May. 

Reuters