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 prospects—about 30%—at nighttime. It additionally precipitated a widespread Waymo meltdown, with apparently all energetic Waymo robotaxis within the affected components of 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 “quickly suspended” as a result of outage. “We’re targeted on preserving our riders protected and making certain emergency personnel have the clear entry they should do their work,” Philion stated.

6 Waymo’s parked at a damaged visitors gentle blocking the roads. Looks as if 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 have been nonetheless out of fee, nor on what had precipitated the issue within the first place.

Gizmodo requested Waymo if the automobiles had bother traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the difficulty had one thing to do with knowledge 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 sort of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned firm, there’s no technique to be completely certain that the issue wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type state of affairs, during 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 during 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

Useless waymos throughout SF blocking roads on account 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 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 most likely 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 underneath their automotive.

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