An hourslong power outage in San Francisco over the weekend that caused tens of thousands of households to lose electricity also knocked out Waymo service, with the ubiquitous self-driving cars coming to a halt at darkened traffic signals, blocking traffic and angering drivers of regular vehicles that became stuck as a result.
The ride-hailing service remained offline Sunday afternoon and tow truck operators said they had been towing Waymos for hours overnight. Social media was littered with videos of the vehicles at blocked intersections with their hazard lights blinking.
The company temporarily suspended its ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, a Waymo spokesperson said in an email. The service was expected to resume shortly after 3:30 p.m. San Francisco time.
A representative from the San Francisco mayor’s office and the Waymo spokesperson said the decision to suspend services occurred after the mayor’s team contacted the company about the significant gridlock its cars were contributing to.
Nearly 19,000 electricity customers in San Francisco remained without power on Sunday afternoon, according to the site PowerOutage.com. Pacific Gas & Electric, the local utility, said on social media that it expected to have all power restored by 2 p.m. Monday.
Waymo, owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, came to San Francisco in 2023, and now has around 1,000 vehicles roaming the streets. The cars have become somewhat of a tourist attraction, and are popular among riders, including women who feel safer in a driverless car than one driven by a man, and parents who use them for school pickup.
But the deployment of vehicles in the Bay Area has not come without problems, including one taxi making an illegal U-turn and another running over a beloved neighborhood cat.
The malfunctions this weekend are especially curious, experts said, because Waymo and other self-driving car companies design their vehicles so they can continue to operate when they lose access to wireless networks or when they encounter traffic lights that have lost power.
Poor weather often knocks out traffic lights in San Francisco, and typically, this does not cause problems with the operation of self-driving cars like Waymos. These cars, which are powered by onboard batteries, are also designed to drive in areas where they temporarily lose access to a wireless signal.
“This technology is designed to work in the event of communication latency or dropout,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law who specializes in emerging automotive technologies and was previously general counsel at an autonomous vehicle start-up called nuTonomy. “These cars are not supposed to rely on an immediate communications link.”
Taking a poke at Waymo, Elon Musk said on his social media platform X that Tesla Robotaxis, which provide limited self-driving ride-share services in San Francisco, had been unaffected during the power outage. The Tesla vehicle service was launched with a human safety monitor on board.
Like other self-driving cars, Waymo’s vehicles do encounter situations where they need access to wireless networks. Waymo and other companies employ remote technicians who can help these cars deal with problems that they cannot solve on their own.
Mr. Wansley and others speculated that the operational problems Waymo experienced during the power outage could be related to this kind of remote assistance.
“Remote facilitation may be more critical to safe operation than we know,” Mr. Wansley said.
Waymo said in the statement that while its vehicles are designed to treat nonfunctional signals as four-way stops, “the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections. This contributed to traffic friction during the height of the congestion.”
Waymo has prided itself on its robot taxis being safer than human drivers, resulting in far fewer crashes, and has published a peer-reviewed research paper on the subject.
No injuries or accidents were reported from Saturday’s Waymo outages, city officials in San Francisco said. The company has previously issued recalls of the vehicles after software malfunctions caused cars to collide, on separate occasions, with a pickup truck and a telephone pole in Phoenix.
David Solnit was sitting on the patio of Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe when the chaos began to unfold. He said he saw nearly a dozen Waymos block intersections and pedestrian walkways for two hours on Saturday evening in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, and even watched one Waymo almost back into another person’s car.
Mr. Solnit said the sight had him concerned about how Waymos might operate in other emergencies, including during earthquakes and when wildfires break out, both somewhat common occurrences in California. He said that he was also concerned about stalled Waymos that might block emergency vehicles.
“They’re a disaster,” he said of the Waymo vehicles.
But Eric Black, who also witnessed almost a dozen stalled Waymos while driving to San Francisco’s Richmond District on Saturday, said he was relieved that the vehicles had stopped in their tracks instead of trying to navigate a dangerous situation. He said he saw many accidents or near collisions involving cars driven by people — not Waymos.
“I’m still a little nervous,” said Mr. Black, who added that he has always been skeptical about taking a Waymo himself. “I work in I.T., so I’m used to system bugs and failures. I tend to not want to rely on anything that’s fully automated.”
Beyond safety, Waymo critics have argued that the self-driving cars could siphon people from public transit ridership and eliminate jobs while simultaneously enriching executives in Silicon Valley.
Still, the company is expanding. Last month, it announced it would provide freeway service down the Peninsula and pickups at the airport in San Jose. Soon, Waymo expects to serve San Francisco International Airport.
By Sunday afternoon, the streets in San Francisco were back to normal, residents said — aside from the absence of Waymos.
Shortly after Waymo announced its services would resume, those trying to hail a ride were still greeted by a message from the Waymo app: “Our service is currently paused. We’re sorry for the inconvenience — please check back again soon.”
A bit later, service was restored.
Cade Metz contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
Sonia A. Rao reports on disability issues as a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
The post Waymo Suspended Service in San Francisco After Its Cars Stalled During Power Outage appeared first on New York Times.
