Power outage paralyzes Waymo robotaxis

Monday, December 22, 2025

San Francisco was affected by a massive power outage over the weekend. It started with a fire at a substation in the city on Saturday afternoon, causing a blackout that at times affected as much as a third of the city, leaving more than 130,000 homes without power. Among the city's affected critical systems were the traffic lights, which paralyzed Waymo's fleet of robotaxis, stopping them in their tracks and clogging traffic.

Posted by LampLighter at 10:22 PM | 2 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry |

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... The cars drive conservatively, but they can get confused in edge cases"earlier this month, Waymo issued a recall to fix a problem in which its robotaxis would illegally pass stopped school buses. ...

When the traffic lights went out, Waymo's robotaxis got a little too cautious at intersections. With no red-yellow-green to cue drivers, the rule is to treat the intersection as a four-way stop. Indeed, Waymo's cars are programmed to do this, but it seems the scale of the outage over the weekend was just too much to handle.

Social media and Reddit began to fill with videos of stationary Waymos at intersections, and the company temporarily suspended service. ...

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-12-22 10:26 PM | Reply

@#1 ... the company temporarily suspended service. ...

Meanwhile, if you happened to be in a Waymo vehicle going somewhere important to you, you were stranded?

#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-12-22 10:28 PM | Reply