The 2008 Summer Olympics are destined to go down as one of the biggest digital events the world has yet to see, spanning across the TV, Internet and the mobile phone. With a million moving pieces, it’s not likely that everything will go according to plan, and sure enough mocoNews stumbled across one of the technical glitches—if you signed up for text alerts on your phone to get medal updates or breaking news alerts, it didn’t work. And, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Together, we tried a total of four phones, spanning at least three different carriers. As of right now, the issues are supposedly resolved, but we are waiting to get the official word from NBC.

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The problem started Monday when I signed up for alerts on my phone at mobile.nbcolympics.com, and by Thursday had not received any alerts (especially since I was sure an American had won a medal by then). So, I called Bellevue-based SinglePoint because they are providing the back-end messaging capabilities to 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.” Calls seeking more information have been made to NBC and Starcut, which was selected to build NBC’s Olympics Mobile website.

The outage likely only affected users who were signing up for alerts on the phone, rather than online from a computer. SinglePoint said it did not know how many users signed up that way. But this does have to put a damper on things for NBC, which believed the Olympics had the power to create long-term mobile habits from first-time users. Earlier this week, NBC released some figures for the mobile site, saying they are “stunned” by the adoption of mobile usage, which hit up to 476,000 unique visitors on Monday. The more astonishing figure is that NBC says half of the people viewing on mobile were using it for the first time.

To be sure, the text alert program was aggressive. SinglePoint, which also provides text-message capabilities for TV shows like “Deal or No Deal,” said it was the largest scale project it has ever done. CEO Rich Begert said it required a lot of integration from various vendors. The content was very customizable. The user can request medal alerts, breaking news alerts, video highlights and the photo of the day. Online there was a larger selection of text alerts available, such as signing up for news from your local NBC affiliate. Also, alerts are in real-time, meaning you can find out who wins the gold as it was happening, not hours later when it’s replayed on NBC (that also means they may wake you up in the middle of the night). The best part: other than normal texting rates, they are free. Begert: “This is something that the broadcaster understands. This kind of interactivity helps bring viewers to the event, It drives their revenues because it makes people feel more connected.”

UPDATE: NBC said today that the impact on users was minimal because a majority of people signed up for text alerts online, not from their phone. In the end, they said less than .5 percent of all mobile users were affected. Apparently, the glitch occurred when they were making changes to the mobile site to accommodate large amounts of traffic.