Waymo Launched a Revealing Postmortem on Its San Francisco Blackout Meltdown

A postmortem from Waymo on Tuesday is providing at the least some readability about what the hell occurred to its poor, benighted San Francisco operation after a lot of the ability throughout the town went out on Saturday.

Waymo habits at darkish stoplights pressured the Alphabet-owned firm to name all its San Francisco robotaxis again dwelling, a logistical disaster. However in equity, social media posts most likely made Waymo’s ad-hoc answer look much more haphazard than it truly was, giving the impression that each one the Waymos in San Francisco had been zapped on the identical time by no matter triggered the outage, inflicting them to halt in place, together with in busy intersections, as if their robotic drivers had been raptured to robo-heaven.

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

— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025

There were certainly choked streets and blocked intersections, however beneath is how Waymo prefers to border the way in which the issue arose. Notice that in its comms, Waymo refers back to the self-driving software program in its automobiles as “the Waymo Driver.”

“Whereas the Waymo Driver is designed to deal with darkish site visitors indicators as four-way stops, it might sometimes request a affirmation examine to make sure it makes the most secure selection. Whereas we efficiently traversed greater than 7,000 darkish indicators on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some circumstances, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”

It appears essential to Waymo’s model to not ever enable the impression that Waymos are ever remotely pushed. What Waymo has as an alternative of “distant drivers” or “teleoperators” is named “fleet response,” a Waymo weblog put up says. When the Waymo Driver encounters a very heterogeneous driving scenario, it sends out for human suggestions, which we’re not supposed to think about as a bailout. It’d need affirmation about, say, what it suspects is a very impassable intersection, and a human operator sends again indicators directing it the place it’d wish to go.

“Fleet response can affect the Waymo Driver’s path, whether or not not directly by indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a specific lane, or, in probably the most complicated eventualities, explicitly proposing a path for the automobile to contemplate,” the Waymo weblog put up about Fleet Response says. You would possibly or won’t take into account this the enter of a “distant driver” or a “teleoperator.” Waymo clearly doesn’t.

At any price, all these furtive Waymos at blacked-out stoplights in San Francisco on Saturday created a logjam of those requests for human suggestions, and Waymo’s postmortem acknowledges that the logjam triggered even worse site visitors.

So what Waymo says occurred subsequent looks like an affordable plan of action in response to inflicting site visitors throughout a blackout: “We directed our fleet to tug over and park appropriately so we might return autos to our depots in waves. This ensured we didn’t additional add to the congestion or hinder emergency autos in the course of the peak of the restoration effort.”

From the surface, and particularly on social media, that is the half that seemed worse than it actually was. Posts exhibiting Waymos in intersections may very well be seen subsequent to posts exhibiting Waymos stopped in conjunction with the street. This made it appear like San Francisco was a post-apocalypic wasteland strewn with lifeless robotaxis. It’s affordable to ask: in the event that they weren’t lifeless, why didn’t the corporate ship them dwelling? Nevertheless it’s additionally affordable for Waymo to wish to keep away from a vital mass of Waymos disrupting San Francisco like a herd of stampeding Wildebeasts, and thus making the autos simply wait on the facet of the street till their group is named.

This created an extra dangerous search for Waymo: alongside the Waymos that did turn into obstructions, there have been at the least some crowds of safely parked Waymos, not glitching out, however merely ready for the sign to return to their depots in an orderly style.

6 Waymo’s parked at a damaged site 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

There aren’t any future plans talked about within the postmortem about introducing distant drivers. What future plans are included, reasonably puzzlingly, don’t embrace something—at the least to date—about altering the Waymo Driver’s basic driving software program in any respect. The three bullets about Waymo’s “path ahead” all deal with emergencies: “Integrating extra details about outages,” “Updating our emergency preparedness and response,” and “Increasing our first responder engagement.”

Robotaxis are programmed to drive conservatively, and thus have boy scout-like habits information in combination, however this postmortem doesn’t present Waymo reflecting in any respect about the truth that these are aliens on our roads who will misbehave and fail in completely novel methods that may’t be predicted. The truth is, it ends on a notice of defiance, saying “we’re undaunted by the chance to problem the established order of our roads, and we’re proud to proceed serving San Franciscan residents and guests.”