A postmortem from Waymo on Tuesday is offering at least some clarity about what the hell happened to its poor, benighted San Francisco operation after much of the power across the city went out on Saturday.
Waymo behavior at dark stoplights forced the Alphabet-owned company to call all its San Francisco robotaxis back home, a logistical catastrophe. But in fairness, social media posts probably made Waymo’s ad-hoc solution look even more haphazard than it actually was, giving the impression that all the Waymos in San Francisco had been zapped at the same time by whatever caused the outage, causing them to halt in place, including in busy intersections, as if their robot drivers had been raptured to robo-heaven.
Power outage took out the waymos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku
— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025
There were certainly choked streets and blocked intersections, but below is how Waymo prefers to frame the way the problem arose. Note that in its comms, Waymo refers to the self-driving software in its cars as “the Waymo Driver.”
“While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”
It seems very important to Waymo’s brand to not ever allow the impression that Waymos are ever remotely driven. What Waymo has instead of “remote drivers” or “teleoperators” is called “fleet response,” a Waymo blog post says. When the Waymo Driver encounters a truly heterogeneous driving situation, it sends out for human feedback, which we’re not supposed to think of as a bailout. It might want confirmation about, say, what it suspects is a completely impassable intersection, and a human operator sends back signals directing it where it might want to go.
“Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver’s path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider,” the Waymo blog post about Fleet Response says. You might or might not consider this the input of a “remote driver” or a “teleoperator.” Waymo clearly doesn’t.
At any rate, all these furtive Waymos at blacked-out stoplights in San Francisco on Saturday created a logjam of these requests for human feedback, and Waymo’s postmortem acknowledges that the logjam caused even worse traffic.
So what Waymo says happened next seems like a reasonable course of action in response to causing traffic during a blackout: “We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves. This ensured we did not further add to the congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort.”
From the outside, and especially on social media, this is the part that looked worse than it really was. Posts showing Waymos in intersections could be seen next to posts showing Waymos stopped at the side of the road. This made it look like San Francisco was a post-apocalypic wasteland strewn with dead robotaxis. It’s reasonable to ask: if they weren’t dead, why didn’t the company send them home? But it’s also reasonable for Waymo to want to avoid a critical mass of Waymos disrupting San Francisco like a herd of stampeding Wildebeasts, and thus making the vehicles just wait on the side of the road until their group is called.
This created a further bad look for Waymo: alongside the Waymos that did become obstructions, there were at least some crowds of safely parked Waymos, not glitching out, but simply waiting for the signal to go back to their depots in an orderly fashion.
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
There are no future plans mentioned in the postmortem about introducing remote drivers. What future plans are included, rather puzzlingly, don’t include anything—at least so far—about changing the Waymo Driver’s fundamental driving software at all. The three bullets about Waymo’s “path forward” all focus on emergencies: “Integrating more information about outages,” “Updating our emergency preparedness and response,” and “Expanding our first responder engagement.”
Robotaxis are programmed to drive conservatively, and thus have boy scout-like behavior records in aggregate, but this postmortem doesn’t show Waymo reflecting at all about the fact that these are aliens on our roads who will misbehave and fail in totally novel ways that can’t be predicted. In fact, it ends on a note of defiance, saying “we are undaunted by the opportunity to challenge the status quo of our roads, and we’re proud to continue serving San Franciscan residents and visitors.”
Read the full article here
