Took a while to write this, but I was flying on Delta almost two weeks ago—on the Saturday when the CrowdStrike bug hit.

We were flying on a family vacation. Our departure was scheduled for the afternoon. The TSA lines looked long, but nowhere close to a bad day. The lines for the customer service desks stretched through the airport.

Delta had made an effort to bring all their employees in. There were a lot of employees in vests, and most of them were busy. Customers with problems still vastly outnumbered the airline staff.

Once we got past security, we saw the LONG lines. Customers lined up from the customer service desk until the end of the concourse. It might have been as massive of mess as I’ve seen.

Screens all over the airport had error messages.

Our flight had a standby list of about 150 passengers, which was a fair fraction of the plane’s capacity. The flight was almost completely sold beforehand, so all the standby passengers were competing for only a few seats. The gate area was overflowing.

Huge numbers of passengers were lined up to ask where they were in the pecking order. The public monitors had blue screens. The gate agents announced to all the passengers that, if they had a seat assigned, they’d be on the flight. If they had a seat request, then it was a long shot and to expect to be flying on Monday or Tuesday.

The flight was delayed—first by a late arrival, then waiting on a member of the flight crew, then because they needed a motor to start an engine. All in all, delayed for about two hours, and we were lucky. A hundred or so had to wait on another flight.

Some passengers tried to get into the Sky Club—that had been over capacity for hours, and usually turns people away on a good day.

The gate staff and the flight staff and the other passengers were tired, but decent people, and acted kind.