Early Monday morning, thousands of Long Island Rail Road commuters showed up at their train platforms expecting a normal day. But instead they were greeted with crowds, chaos, and a general lack of information.

The MTA had announced the previous evening at about 7 p.m. that a little over 80 percent of LIRR service would be back online for the morning rush hour. 

And that was the last anyone heard from the LIRR...until Monday morning at 5:06 a.m., when the agency tweeted that service wouldn't start...until 7 a.m. (And the Port Washington branch didn't get back online even then.) 

Twitter quickly became a wonderland of complaints.

Not a good day to be taking the LIRR. Major delays in Mineola pic.twitter.com/5zdFqbXBvu

— Kristin Thorne (@KristinThorne) January 25, 2016

#NYC-bound train finally arrives at Huntington #LIRR at 7:20 am with 2-hour snow delay. It's packed pic.twitter.com/dsJDkeZ2mp

— Víctor Manuel Ramos (@vmramos) January 25, 2016

Once these commuters arrived at Penn Station (and only Penn, since service to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn was also suspended), they were even more frustrated, having endured painfully long and crowded rides.

"It was really slow, and really packed," Farmingdale resident Austin Catania said. "I deal with it too much. I'm moving to Queens soon, so I won't have to deal with it anymore."

It wasn't just average riders who were surprised at the last-minute change of heart. Speaking after an unrelated event in Manhattan at about noon Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo didn't appear to be aware that the railroad had changed its mind at the last minute, but defended the agency nonetheless.

“I don’t know what they said when,” Cuomo said. “I know they ran into all sorts of weather complications, and I know they were working very, very hard. But there was a lot of snow out there. Don’t kid yourself. And there was a lot of snow on tracks, and frozen signals, and my guess is — I don't know — my guess is they ran into more complications than they expected when they put the trains back in service.”

The MTA said the reason for the delay was because "switches and tracks that had been prepared for service have re-frozen due to unexpected low overnight temperatures."

That's understandable, said Mark Epstein, the head of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council. "The railroad doesn't have control over storms." What's less understandable, though, was the lack of information flowing from the MTA to commuters. He described service alerts and announcements that bore little resemblance to conditions on the ground.

"They failed miserably in terms of communication," Epstein said of the LIRR.

That message was echoed in the MTA's board room Monday, where, coincidentally, committee meetings were taking place.

"There was contradictory information sent out through the night and even this morning telling people at one point there was no service, " board member Ira Greenberg told his colleagues. "Meanwhile there was service."

LIRR committee chair Mitchell Pally promised that the agency would look into it.  "We will be providing a full report next month," he said.

"We're doing a full investigation," said MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan.

With additional reporting from Stephen Nessen.