Excessive tweeting has been blamed for the awful coverage of the men's cycling road race on the opening day of the Olympics.
The race was one of the most eagerly awaited events in the early stages of the London Games but, while Mark Cavendish and Team GB were well short of finishing in the medals, the BBC were also left red-faced.
Viewers were angered by a lack of graphics, poor audio and repeated mistakes as the commentators struggled to cover the lengthy road event to an acceptable standard.
In a statement the BBC blamed Olympic host broadcaster OBS, who then subsequently pointed the finger at Locog for failing to provide timing graphics.
Now the International Olympic Committee has claimed that the mobile network used by OBS became swamped by the near one million people who had squeezed onto London's streets to watch the event.
With fans keen to update Twitter and Facebook, the network became jammed, resulting in an inability to display the vital information as GPS signals from the competitors' bikes were lost.
IOC communications director Mark Adams said that spectators may have to reconsider how they interact with social media during extremely popular events.
"From my understanding one network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers," Adams said.
"We don't want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates, but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates."
OBS spokesman Mark Parkman said Sunday's women's road race, which saw Brit Lizzie Armitstead take silver, passed off much more smoothly.
"Today was much better," he said. "We received the data from Locog and its data provider and it made a great difference."