Over the weekend, NBC says it racked up record-breaking numbers for Olympic viewing. The U.S. audience for the opening ceremony, although delayed seven hours, garnered 40.7 million viewers, and Saturday's primetime audience reached 28.7 million, two million more than watched the 1996 games in Atlanta in that time slot.

The network, though, may be setting another record, one for tweets by disgruntled watchers. Among the hashtags where grousing about the network has been posted are #nbcfail, #nbcdelayed and #nbcsucks.

Tape delays of events have spawned a stream of tweets mocking NBC's sense of timeliness in covering events. Those tweets are typically slugged with "BREAKING" followed by news such as "Orville and Wilbur Wright's machine flies," "Mark Spitz wins gold in 100m freestyle," and "Roman Emperor Theodosius bans Olympic Games, NBC delay to catch up shortly."

Other tweeters address the event delays more directly. "NBCNot Broadcasting Coverage of the Olympics until 5 hours later," complained .