Writing this just to save myself from explaining my personal experience to everyone during the Delta outage. Might be a first world problem, but i hope it will be an interesting read.

I was on a trip to Atlanta and had a return flight to Oklahoma City (OKC) on Monday, 8th August 2016, scheduled to depart at 9:50PM via Delta Airlines. 

I read about the systems failure at delta facilities in social media late Monday. I wanted to make sure my flight isn't cancelled, so i checked "delta.com", "flydelta" mobile app and both of them said my flight is on time, also tried calling delta customer care and heard a 2+hr waiting time from the automated system. I checked in online but my seat was not assigned. So i went to the airport, cleared the security and was at my gate (A2) by 8:30PM. 

At that time an unusually large crowd at the terminal and a really loooong queue at the delta help desk, people sleeping everywhere in the terminal. At my gate the Monitor says, the flight is to OKC and it is on time. So i stood in the line to talk to the agent, so that i will get my boarding pass with a seat number. After a while, delta agent announces that the flight at the gate is to Norfolk, VA (On another note this flight departed at 1:30 AM and i guess they waited approximately for 12 hours) and the flight to OKC is not going to come here and we have to wait there until they assign a new gate to our flight. After 1 hour in the line, I got my boarding pass and the waiting game begins. During this wait i got a notification in the delta app, that the gate is changed to A20, so i and few others, who wants to be the first to reach walked there, only to hear from the delta agent that they have no idea about OKC flight at their gate and asked us to go back to our originally assigned gate.

At approximately 2:00AM (4hrs 10min past the scheduled departure), flight pilots announce, they have to leave, as they reached their allowed working time of 15 hrs, but this means our flight is not cancelled and we will get new crew to take us home. We keep hearing the same update from the delta agent at the gate, that our flight will get a new gate and we are definitely flying tonight.

At approximately 2:15AM (4hrs 25min past the scheduled departure), delta agent announces that our new gate is E2, our flight and crew is ready, they already started boarding and we will depart in 30 min. So with some sort of relief we make our way towards the train to go to E terminal only to see the train is out of service with some issues. So we walk all the way from gate A2 to E2. Atlanta airport is the busiest airport according to few surveys and the walk from A2 to E2 is approximately 2 miles and it took 20 minutes.

Approximately at 2:35AM (4hrs 45min past schedule departure time), we reached E2 and we saw that the OKC flight is cancelled on the Gate Monitor. No agent was available at that terminal. We had no idea what to do, but we thought it's worth the walk because the queue in the E Terminal is smaller compared to a mile long one in terminal A. So we joined the queue and after a while, A person in red suite (may be a manager there) says they are closing this counter in 10 minutes and we have to go back to terminal A for the hotel and rebook the flight. I can see how disappointed and frustrated people are, as we are roaming in the airport at the middle of the night and we have to stand in a mile long queue in terminal A. But with no other option left and we walk all the way back to terminal A.

I don't want to stand in such a big line, so i went back to my old gate A2 to see if the agent there can get me a hotel and rebook my flight, after waiting approximately for 1 hour, i get my turn (Approximately at 4:15AM - close to 6hr 25mins past scheduled departure), She says she cannot help with hotel and there are no flights available for Tuesday and the earliest i can fly is on Wednesday (8/10/16) at 8:04AM, (I asked her to put me on this). She says hotel might be tough to find and i might have to wait in the airport till my next flight and no compensation will be provided, because she was intimated that the power outage is because of a thunderstorm on Monday morning and since its because of weather, they cannot do anything.

With no option left, I took a uber to my friend's place in Atlanta. I tried to check in online for my flight on Wednesday but it didn't let me.

On Wednesday knowing there might be long queues and i am not checked in, I went to airport 2 hrs prior to departure (6:00AM), after standing in line for 1 hour i got my boarding pass and 30 more min to clear the security. I reached gate and was happy to see the flight is on time on the monitor and approximately at 7:30AM (30min before departure), the agent announces that flight is delayed by 2 hours because our crew is taking their needed rest in some other city and after that they will fly to Atlanta and once they are at the gate they will start boarding. Finally we take of approximately at 10:30AM (2hrs 26min past scheduled departure).

It was a crazy night, way too many frustrated passengers, very little number of poor delta employees trying to help and deal with the angry customers. 

From outside looking in, at least delta should have contacted every one hours before the cancelled/delayed flights, because no one knew about the situation until they cleared security and they were all stuck there. I was also told its because of weather, which i later found out that it was false. I saw an interview of delta CEO, that it's totally because of fire caused in Delta facility. Try not to give false information to the customers. I am sure this is a very rare outage, may be it's just a one time thing from Delta.