Blackout in San Francisco Litters Streets with Traffic-Blocking, Deactivated Waymos

There was a power outage in San Francisco on Saturday, initially leaving 124,000 of 414,000 customers—about 30%—in the dark. It also caused a widespread Waymo meltdown, with apparently all active Waymo robotaxis in the affected parts of the city stuck in robotic comas, blocking intersections and choking traffic on some streets.

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

— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025

 

Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion issued a statement at approximately 7:00 p.m., saying service had been “temporarily suspended†due to the outage. “We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work,†Philion said.

6 Waymo’s parked at a broken traffic light blocking the roads. Seems like they were not trained for a power outage pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe

— Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025

 

As of Sunday morning there wasn’t yet an update from Waymo on whether the company’s robotaxis were still out of commission, nor on what had caused the problem in the first place.

Gizmodo asked Waymo if the vehicles had trouble traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the issue had something to do with data reception or transmission. We also asked the company if any Waymo vehicles were still blocking the streets. We will update if we hear back. (Update: Waymo provided a statement, which has been appended to the end of this article)

Until there’s some kind of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned company, there’s no way to be absolutely sure that the problem wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type situation, in which the nerve center of the robot hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old, causing all the robots to drop dead.

Companies like Waymo hold themselves up as harbingers of a safer future on the roads, touting statistics like 82% fewer crashes in which an airbag deployed, and 92% fewer pedestrian collisions with injuries when compared to human drivers. 

Power out in SF and the @Waymo’s are causing a MASSIVE jam in North Beach 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma

— Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) December 21, 2025

Dead waymos all over SF blocking roads due to power outage 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/CAsSxFroX3

— @jason (@Jason) December 21, 2025

But, like when a San Francisco Waymo fatally ran over a locally famous cat named Kit Kat in October, the issue may be less about Waymos being better or worse than humans in aggregate than the fact that robots fail in unpredictable, alien ways. The actual footage of Kit Kat’s fatal injury shows one such example. A human driver probably wouldn’t do what seems to happen in the video: start from a dead stop while a person is actively trying to coax a cat out from under their car.

Similarly, human drivers tend not to suddenly go offline en masse when there’s a blackout.

Updated at 7:12 p.m. ET. A Waymo spokesperson provided the following statement:

“We are resuming ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions. While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events.

“Throughout the outage, we closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials. We are focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned from this event, and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day.â€

A parenthetical has also been added above indicating that Waymo replied to Gizmodo.