Blackout in San Francisco Litters Streets with Traffic-Blocking, Deactivated Waymos
Robot chaos in the tech capital of the U.S.
By Mike Pearl Published December 21, 2025
A Waymo robotaxi in an intersection © Iv-olga via Shutterstock Comments (19)
There was a power outage in San Francisco on Saturday, initially leaving 124,000 of 414,000 customers—about 30%—in the dark. It also caused a widespread Waymo meltdown, with apparently all active Waymo robotaxis in the affected parts of the city stuck in robotic comas, blocking intersections and choking traffic on some streets.
Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion issued a statement at approximately 7:00 p.m., saying service had been “temporarily suspended” due to the outage. “We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work,” Philion said.
As of Sunday morning there wasn’t yet an update from Waymo on whether the company’s robotaxis were still out of commission, nor on what had caused the problem in the first place.
Gizmodo asked Waymo if the vehicles had trouble traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the issue had something to do with data reception or transmission. We also asked the company if any Waymo vehicles were still blocking the streets. We will update if we hear back.
Until there’s some kind of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned company, there’s no way to be absolutely sure that the problem wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type situation, in which the nerve center of the robot hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old, causing all the robots to drop dead.
Companies like Waymo hold themselves up as harbingers of a safer future on the roads, touting statistics like 82% fewer crashes in which an airbag deployed, and 92% fewer pedestrian collisions with injuries when compared to human drivers. |
