Videos, Pictures Show Stranded Passengers, Luggage Amid Flight Chaos

Frustrated travelers are sharing videos and pictures of the airport chaos resulting from thousands of flight cancellations in the northeast.

Flyers stuck at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport, one of United Airlines' busiest hubs, have been uploading clips of long customer service lines and baggage pile-ups of unattended luggage onto Twitter as the airline continues to suffer weather-related disruptions.

"It's nuts, okay?" one man is heard saying as he films the line for the United customer service desk. "This is 17 seconds, 18, 19, 20, 21 seconds just filming this massive line."

Since Saturday, airlines have canceled more than 5,400 flights. On Wednesday morning, a FlightAware tracker showed that there are currently 707 cancellations and 1,660 delays within, into, and out of the United States.

Newark has reported the highest number of disruptions, with 71 outbound flights and 77 inbound flights canceled, according to the tracker. The airport is experiencing a total of 109 delays.

Stranded passengers told CBS News over the weekend that they resorted to sleeping on tables, luggage carts and the floor of Newark after they were left with nowhere to go.

"Thousands of people stranded at Newark airport, flights getting cancelled left, right and centre," one video caption read. "People not being allowed to just get their luggage and leave. The staff keep shouting no retrievals. The line to get your luggage is 5 plus hours long. United airlines seems clueless."

Serving about 63 percent of Newark's passengers, United Airlines is the largest carrier at the airport. The airline's own frustration with the ongoing flight disruptions has spilled out into public view after CEO Scott Kirby sent a strongly-worded memo to staffers, telling them, "The FAA frankly failed us this weekend."

While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has pointed to thunderstorms that have battered the East Coast for the cancellations, Kirby called out the FAA for staffing problems with air traffic controllers, saying that weather in the tri-state area has been "something that the FAA has historically been able to manage without a severe impact on our operation and customers."

"The FAA reduced the arrival rates by 40% and the departure rates by 75%. That is almost certainly a reflection of understaffing/lower experience at the FAA," Kirby wrote. "It led to massive delays, cancellations, diversions, as well as crews and aircraft out of position."

Newsweek reached out to the FAA for comment.

Similar flight disruptions have been reported at New York's LaGuardia Airport, North Carolina's Charlotte Douglas International Airport and Washington, D.C.'s Dulles International Airport.

"7 hour delay on my flight last night due to lightning storms in Charlotte - when we finally left, the Pilot had to go outside & load luggage cuz airport maintenance was gone for the night," one Twitter user wrote alongside a video of the airport's Terminal B.

"In Charlotte at 1am, thousands missed their flights, 2 - 3 hour lines for people to rebook I've never seen so many people sleeping at the airport before; in hallways, in the chapel - all 5 terminals had massive lines of people waiting to rebook missed flights."

Passengers trapped at LaGuardia described seeing many travelers crying, sleeping on cots at the airport and being deplaned after spending hours sitting on the tarmac.

"Now, we're going to drive five hours to Minneapolis because they can't get us out until Friday at the earliest," one woman told CNN.