Twitter interference at Olympics

Coverage of the London Olympics starting with a glitch - a GPS tracking service that could let broadcasters know where riders in the bicycling road races were on the course, or the times between riders.  The IOC blamed Twitter users for flooding local telecomm providers with "non-urgent" tweets.

The problem arose due to lack of data bandwidth provided by telecom carriers, which did not properly anticipate demand. In a sense, the bandwidth allocation issue is not surprising given the scale of social media during these Olympics. CNET's Zack Whittaker reports that users send almost ten million tweets during the opening ceremonies alone.

The possibility of overloading local nets was anticipated by organizers and local authorities (see this earlier post) - but it's not clear whether they made much of an effort to address the problem, other than asking people not to use the net during the Games..

Source -  Twitter disrupts GPS systems of Olympic cyclers,  ZDNet.com