Facebook experiences brief outages, but users seem to enjoy time offline

Facebook was briefly down earlier Saturday for many users worldwide, with thousands of people reported log-in errors and problems posting and sharing on the social media platform.

The problem occurred at around 9 a.m. ET (1300 GMT) Saturday and lasted for a couple of hours before appearing to be resolved for many users, according to Down Detector, a site that tracks real-time outages and other online issues.

At its peak, the website received more than 3,400 reports of outages, according to Down Detector.

More than 40 percent of the users who experienced the technical glitch said they cannot log in their Facebook account, while some other 40-percent reported total blackout, and a few said they had problem loading pictures, according to Down Detector.

Facebook users also complained that they experienced the issue on both the mobile and web versions.

Facebook acknowledged the outage in a statement sent to media.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Facebook services. We quickly investigated and are currently restoring service for everyone. We're sorry for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson noted.

The cause of the technical issue remains unknown.

Some users of picture-sharing app Instagram, owned by Facebook, also reported similar problems.

As an alternative, some people took to Twitter to share their experience, making #facebookdown and #instagramdown trending topics on Twitter.

However, the outages didn't seem to affect many people, and a majority number of them even said they enjoy a social-media-free weekend, according to Twitter polls conducted by Xinhua on Sunday morning.

By the time the story was released, more than a thousand Twitter users participated in Xinhua's polls.

Despite the Facebook outage, 38 percent of 501 participants said they enjoy the time offline, while roughly the same number said they feel just fine to have a social-media-free weekend.

Only 13 percent said they felt "a little uneasy" for not being able to use social media at weekends, and the same amount noted they were in "agony."

In a separate poll, 66 percent of more than 550 participants said they would spend a social-media-free weekend with friends and family or simply enjoy being alone.

"Because Instagram and Facebook are down, I actually talked to my family. They seem like really nice people," said Dev Mittal in a personal tweet in response to the outages.