My first experience last night with GE kiosks being down at ATL. Mrs. GHF recently got her GE, so we were looking forward to both using it to avoid the ATL lines. On board, the FA wasn't going to give us a blue form since we were GE, but I insisted. Good thing...

Upon arrival at ATL, the gate agent meeting the plane stated that GE kiosks were down and all pax, including GE, had to have a blue form.

We got into the immigration hall to lines that extended back almost to the escalators. Told my wife to head for the machines, and we'd jump to the front. Well, almost. The crew line was 50 people deep, and they were processing the foreign crews at about 2-3 minutes per (ouch). The next line over was apparently a VIP line (?) and it had 2-3 folks in it. I assumed they were GE folks, so we took our place in that line. Turned out that they were foreign pax, they processed 2 (at about 2 minutes per), and the third was sent to secondary.

Immigration agent was glad to see 2 Americans, and noted that the fingerprint scanners were taking "forever" to return a response, and he thought that the problem with the booth fingerprint scanners was related to the GE kiosk issue. With carry-on, Customs was a breeze, and we got the TSA line with no strip-search machine.

10 minutes end-to-end, about 5 minutes longer than "normal" when GE is working.

The earlier flight to IAD had not left, DL gate agent accommodated us (there were even 2 F seats available....) and we got home 3 hours early.