This summer, my Colgan flight was running late from EWR and I got rebooked on US at the ticket counter without even having to ask for it. They were right though, I would have missed my connection in EWR by about 10 min.

Another anecdote, several years ago while waiting at the gate in DTW with a fully loaded KLM MD-11 they had to reboot. Everything went dark for about 5 minutes, they did their checks and we were good to go. Offloading a full MD-11 and reboarding would have been a major delay, not to mention any immigration hassles.