Fans asked to tweet from Olympics only if it's 'urgent'

This is supposed to be the Twitter Olympics, but tweet- and text-clogged networks appear to have caused problems for broadcasters at the London Games.

Broadcasters complained over the weekend that they were unable to determine the distance between cyclists in Saturday's road races because GPS and communications systems had failed. A spokesman blamed the problems on overuse of Twitter and text messages. "From my understanding, One network was oversubscribed, and OBS (the Olympic Broadcasting Service) are trying to spread the load to other providers," Mark Adams, a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, was quoted by The Guardian as saying. "We don't want to stop people engaging in this by social media," he added, "but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates."