There was an influence outage in San Francisco on Saturday, initially leaving 124,000 of 414,000 prospects—about 30%—at midnight. 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” as a result of outage. “We’re centered on maintaining our riders secure 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 as if they weren’t skilled 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 have been nonetheless out of fee, nor on what had brought on the issue within the first place.
Gizmodo requested Waymo if the automobiles had hassle traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the difficulty had one thing to do with information reception or transmission. We additionally requested the corporate if any Waymo automobiles have been nonetheless blocking the streets. We are going to replace if we hear again.
Till there’s some form of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned firm, there’s no strategy to be completely positive that the issue wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type state of affairs, through which the nerve heart of the robotic hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old, inflicting all of the robots to drop useless.
Firms 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 Seashore 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma
— Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) December 21, 2025
Useless waymos throughout SF blocking roads attributable to 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 Package Kat in October, the difficulty could also be much less about Waymos being higher or worse than people in mixture than the truth that robots fail in unpredictable, alien methods. The actual footage of Kit Kat’s fatal injury exhibits one such instance. A human driver in all probability wouldn’t do what appears to occur within the video: begin from a useless cease whereas an individual is actively attempting to coax a cat out from underneath their automobile.
Equally, human drivers have a tendency to not instantly go offline en masse when there’s a blackout.
