NBC Olympic Mobile Alerts Run Into Glitch

MocoNews reports that NBC’s much-ballyhooed Mobile Alerts program for the Olympics failed to work properly on every phone they tried.

The site tried four separate handsets that spanned three carriers, but no dice. To check on the situation, blogger Tricia Duryee called Bellevue-based SinglePoint, which powers the back-end messaging capabilities for NBC. “They promised to investigate the situation, and at about 8 p.m. last night I started getting alerts. Today, SinglePoint explained the problem in a statement: ‘We identified an issue with some of the data we received from another vendor, we immediately informed them about it and it was resolved.’”

For its part, NBC said that the “impact on users was minimal because a majority of people signed up for text alerts online, not from their phone,” the report said. The studio claims that less than 0.5 percent of all mobile users were affected, and that the glitch came while the studio was upgrading their mobile service to deal with the heavy traffic.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.