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Good news for X fans, with Elon Musk announcing that he’s scaling back his work on improving government efficiency in order to focus on his businesses in Tesla, SpaceX and X/xAI.
The bad news? Coinciding with Musk’s announcement, X suffered a series of outages, which may or may not be linked to a significant fire in one of its data centers.
Late last week, emergency services attended a major fire at an Oregon data center owned by X. The fire was reportedly caused by a battery issue, with the impacts then cascading throughout X’s network, setting off a series of outages and issues.
Indeed, many users reported that they were unable to log in, while new user sign-ups were also impacted.
X acknowledged the issues on Friday, noting that:
“We are experiencing a data center outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.”
X hasn’t specifically confirmed that the fire in Oregon was the cause of the issue, though that does appear to be the case.
X then followed up with this message a day later, explaining that:
“We're still experiencing issues from yesterday's data center outage. Login and sign-up services are unavailable for some users, and there may be delays in notifications and Premium features. Our team is working 24/7 to resolve this.”
And with a much-reduced team from what Twitter once had, X only has so many resources to throw at the issue, which may also have extended the initial time frame for resolution.
Either way, even before this incident, Musk had already made the decision to re-focus on his business interests, and step away from his DOGE government efficiency initiative, with Elon explaining in an interview last week that:
"I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla, plus Starship launch next week, as we have critical technologies rolling out."
Musk further noted that he’ll still be spending “a day or two per week” on his government projects, as required by the President, but he now feels that his main work, in establishing the DOGE group, is complete, enabling him to re-focus on other matters.
Which now includes outages at X, and potential solutions to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Musk did noted that “failover redundancy” measures did not work in this instance, and that “major operational improvements need to be made.” And while X has provided little insight into the actual issues that led to the drop-outs last week, Musk says that he’ll be “sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms” in order to dedicate as much time as possible to addressing issues within his businesses.