Blackout in San Francisco Litters Streets with Visitors-Blocking, Deactivated Waymos

There was an influence outage in San Francisco on Saturday, initially leaving 124,000 of 414,000 clients—about 30%—at the hours of darkness. It additionally brought on a widespread Waymo meltdown, with apparently all energetic Waymo robotaxis within the metropolis caught in robotic comas, blocking intersections and choking visitors on some streets.

Energy outage took out the waymos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku

— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025

Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion issued a statement at roughly 7:00 p.m., saying service had been “briefly suspended” because of the outage. “We’re centered on maintaining our riders protected and guaranteeing emergency personnel have the clear entry they should do their work,” Philion mentioned.

6 Waymo’s parked at a damaged visitors gentle blocking the roads. Looks like they weren’t educated for an influence outage pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe

— Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025

As of Sunday morning there wasn’t but an replace from Waymo on whether or not the corporate’s robotaxis had been nonetheless out of fee, nor on what had brought on the issue within the first place.

Gizmodo requested Waymo if the autos had bother traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the problem had one thing to do with knowledge reception or transmission. We additionally requested the corporate if any Waymo autos had been nonetheless blocking the streets. We’ll replace if we hear again.

Till there’s some sort of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned firm, there’s no method to be completely certain that the issue wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type state of affairs, through which the nerve middle of the robotic hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old, inflicting all of the robots to drop lifeless.

Corporations like Waymo maintain themselves up as harbingers of a safer future on the roads, touting statistics like 82% fewer crashes through which an airbag deployed, and 92% fewer pedestrian collisions with accidents when in comparison with human drivers. 

Energy out in SF and the @Waymo’s are inflicting a MASSIVE jam in North Seaside 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma

— Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) December 21, 2025

Lifeless waymos throughout SF blocking roads as a consequence of energy outage 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/CAsSxFroX3

— @jason (@Jason) December 21, 2025

However, like when a San Francisco Waymo fatally ran over a regionally well-known cat named Equipment Kat in October, the problem could also be much less about Waymos being higher or worse than people in combination than the truth that robots fail in unpredictable, alien methods. The actual footage of Kit Kat’s fatal injury reveals one such instance. A human driver in all probability wouldn’t do what appears to occur within the video: begin from a lifeless cease whereas an individual is actively attempting to coax a cat out from beneath their automotive.

Equally, human drivers have a tendency to not abruptly go offline en masse when there’s a blackout.