Weeks after announcing that he would buy Twitter, the world’s richest person Elon Musk on Friday said that the deal is on hold.

“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” he wrote in a tweet.

Musk shared a Reuters report in his tweet which said that in a regulatory filing to the United States stock exchanges, Twitter had declared that less than 5% of its daily active users, who could be monetised, were spam or fake accounts.

Twitter had 22.9 crore users who were served ads in the first quarter of this financial year, the social media platform has said in the filing, according to Reuters.

It was not clear how or why the number of spam accounts would have a bearing on the Twitter deal. But, the matter is one of Musk’s priorities in acquisition. After announcing the takeover of Twitter, Musk had said that he would remove “spam bots” from the platform.

In its filing on Friday, Twitter also flagged several risks until the deal with Musk is completed, such as whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter and “potential uncertainty regarding our future plans and strategy”, Reuters reported.

On April 26, the microblogging platform had said in a regulatory filing that Musk will buy Twitter for about $44 billion (over Rs 3,36,910 crore). Twitter said that the deal was unanimously approved by its board of directors and is expected to close in 2022, pending regulatory clearance and the approval of shareholders.

On completion of the transaction between Musk and Twitter, the social media firm will become a privately held company. This means that the company would no longer be listed or traded on a public stock exchange. Twitter also will not have to report financial information to the market regulator Security and Exchange Commission or follow many of its rules.