Elon Musk said early Friday that his plan to buy the social media company was "temporarily on hold" over a report of fake accounts on the platform, later adding that he was "still committed" to the deal.
It was not immediately clear based on Musk's tweet if any official steps had been taken to halt the acquisition, which was agreed on in late April with a price tag of about $44 billion.
Twitter's value, calculated based on its stock price, has dropped in recent weeks along with a broader decline in tech stocks.
Twitter was worth about $35 billion as of Friday morning. Following Musk's tweet, the price of Twitter's stock dropped about 13 percent in pre-market trading.
Musk did not immediately respond to questions via Twitter about any steps taken to halt the deal.
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Musk's tweet included a link to a Reuters article from May 2 on Twitter's public filings, in which the company said fake or spam accounts only accounted for about 5 percent of its overall user base. Musk has made cracking down on fake accounts a major part of his reasoning for buying the company.
Twitter currently counts about 229 million daily active users.
Though the deal has not gone through yet — major company acquisitions can often take months or even years to finalize — Twitter has already shown signs of major changes.
On Thursday, Twitter pushed out two executives and instituted a hiring freeze.
