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 triggered a widespread Waymo meltdown, with apparently all energetic Waymo robotaxis within the affected elements of the town 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 targeted on maintaining our riders secure and making certain emergency personnel have the clear entry they should do their work,” Philion mentioned.

6 Waymo’s parked at a damaged visitors mild 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 had been nonetheless out of fee, nor on what had triggered the issue within the first place.

Gizmodo requested Waymo if the autos had hassle 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 are going to replace if we hear again.

Till there’s some type of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned firm, there’s no solution to be completely certain that the issue wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type state of affairs, by 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 by 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 because 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 Package 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 most likely wouldn’t do what appears to occur within the video: begin from a lifeless cease whereas an individual is actively making an attempt to coax a cat out from beneath their automotive.

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