Waymo Robotaxis Stall in SF During Major Blackout

San Francisco has always aspired to the vision of using software to manage a city's mess. But it only works if the city stays readable. When signals, markings, and right-of-way cues fail, robotaxis default to the safest option: slow down, stop, and wait.

The Outage Impact

On Saturday, December 20, 2025, that assumption collapsed. A widespread power outage knocked out electricity across large parts of San Francisco, and traffic signals went dark in multiple neighborhoods.

As the problem grew, footage appeared of Waymo self-driving taxis stopping, with hazard lights on, at intersection after intersection. Human drivers tried to improvise around dark traffic signals and unexpected four-way stops, adding friction to an already tense road situation.

Around 8:00 p.m. that evening, Waymo halted operations of its self-driving ride-sharing service in the San Francisco area. The company framed the pause as a safety step, reducing risk for riders and keeping roads clearer while emergency response and restoration work continued.

However, the blackout itself wasn't a minor one. At peak, reporting estimated roughly 130,000 PG&E customers without power, with restoration stretching into Sunday. Multiple accounts tied the disruption to a fire at a PG&E substation near 8th and Mission, a dense corridor where signal failures can snowball into gridlock fast.

A Pattern of Caution

What makes this event larger than a single poor night is the pattern behind it: when the environment becomes ambiguous, robotaxis often choose caution in a way that looks like a breakdown to everyone else.

Earlier this month, a separate clip out of San Francisco showed three Waymo vehicles stuck on a dead-end residential street, described online as a “standoff.” Waymo later said two vehicles made minor contact at low speed while attempting multi-point turns, turning a routine maneuver into a temporary bottleneck.

And this wasn’t limited to San Francisco. In Venice, California, videos shared on social media from a holiday boat parade revealed a Waymo vehicle hesitating near a bridge crowded with onlookers watching the boats below. With pedestrians spilling into the roadway and vehicles inching through tight space, the robotaxi appeared to pause repeatedly, backing up traffic behind it.

The crowd treated it like entertainment, but the underlying dynamic was familiar: constrained streets and unpredictable movement can force a robotaxi into an ultra-cautious stall.

The Resilience Test

The practical question now is resilience. If robotaxi fleets are going to scale beyond curated operating conditions, they need a reliable “degraded mode” for when the city stops cooperating. When signals fail, visibility shifts, and human behavior changes in real time.

Saturday’s outage was a harsh test because it stacked multiple problems at once: missing infrastructure cues plus a street-level scramble as drivers and pedestrians adjusted on the fly.

What happens next will likely be less about one viral clip and more about the expectations that follow. Residents and city officials don’t just care that a car stops. They care where it stops, whether it blocks an intersection, how quickly it can recover, and whether a service pause happens early enough to prevent cascading congestion.

The blackout put those expectations into sharp focus. And it’s unlikely to be the last time a “driverless” system gets judged by how it behaves when the city’s normal rules vanish.