Waymo Launched a Revealing Postmortem on Its San Francisco Blackout Meltdown

A postmortem from Waymo on Tuesday is providing at the least some readability about what the hell occurred to its poor, benighted San Francisco operation after a lot of the facility throughout town went out on Saturday.

Waymo habits at darkish stoplights pressured the Alphabet-owned firm to name all its San Francisco robotaxis again dwelling, a logistical disaster. However in equity, social media posts in all probability made Waymo’s ad-hoc resolution look much more haphazard than it truly was, giving the impression that each one the Waymos in San Francisco had been zapped on the identical time by no matter triggered the outage, inflicting them to halt in place, together with in busy intersections, as if their robotic drivers had been raptured to robo-heaven.

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

— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025

There were certainly choked streets and blocked intersections, however beneath is how Waymo prefers to border the best way the issue arose. Notice that in its comms, Waymo refers back to the self-driving software program in its automobiles as “the Waymo Driver.”

“Whereas the Waymo Driver is designed to deal with darkish visitors alerts as four-way stops, it might often request a affirmation examine to make sure it makes the most secure selection. Whereas we efficiently traversed greater than 7,000 darkish alerts on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some circumstances, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”

It appears essential to Waymo’s model to not ever permit the impression that Waymos are ever remotely pushed. What Waymo has as a substitute of “distant drivers” or “teleoperators” is known as “fleet response,” a Waymo weblog submit says. When the Waymo Driver encounters a very heterogeneous driving state of affairs, it sends out for human suggestions, which we’re not supposed to consider as a bailout. It’d need affirmation about, say, what it suspects is a very impassable intersection, and a human operator sends again alerts directing it the place it’d need to go.

“Fleet response can affect the Waymo Driver’s path, whether or not not directly by indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a specific lane, or, in essentially the most complicated situations, explicitly proposing a path for the automobile to contemplate,” the Waymo weblog submit about Fleet Response says. You may or won’t contemplate this the enter of a “distant driver” or a “teleoperator.” Waymo clearly doesn’t.

At any price, all these furtive Waymos at blacked-out stoplights in San Francisco on Saturday created a logjam of those requests for human suggestions, and Waymo’s postmortem acknowledges that the logjam triggered even worse visitors.

So what Waymo says occurred subsequent looks as if an affordable plan of action in response to inflicting visitors throughout a blackout: “We directed our fleet to drag over and park appropriately so we may return automobiles to our depots in waves. This ensured we didn’t additional add to the congestion or hinder emergency automobiles throughout the peak of the restoration effort.”

From the skin, and particularly on social media, that is the half that regarded worse than it actually was. Posts exhibiting Waymos in intersections may very well be seen subsequent to posts exhibiting Waymos stopped along side the street. This made it appear to be San Francisco was a post-apocalypic wasteland strewn with lifeless robotaxis. It’s cheap to ask: in the event that they weren’t lifeless, why didn’t the corporate ship them dwelling? However it’s additionally cheap for Waymo to need to keep away from a important mass of Waymos disrupting San Francisco like a herd of stampeding Wildebeasts, and thus making the automobiles simply wait on the facet of the street till their group is known as.

This created an extra unhealthy search for Waymo: alongside the Waymos that did change into obstructions, there have been at the least some crowds of safely parked Waymos, not glitching out, however merely ready for the sign to return to their depots in an orderly style.

6 Waymo’s parked at a damaged visitors mild blocking the roads. Looks like they weren’t educated for an influence outage pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe

— Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025

There are not any future plans talked about within the postmortem about introducing distant drivers. What future plans are included, reasonably puzzlingly, don’t embody something—at the least up to now—about altering the Waymo Driver’s elementary driving software program in any respect. The three bullets about Waymo’s “path ahead” all concentrate on emergencies: “Integrating extra details about outages,” “Updating our emergency preparedness and response,” and “Increasing our first responder engagement.”

Robotaxis are programmed to drive conservatively, and thus have boy scout-like habits data in mixture, however this postmortem doesn’t present Waymo reflecting in any respect about the truth that these are aliens on our roads who will misbehave and fail in completely novel methods that may’t be predicted. In actual fact, it ends on a word of defiance, saying “we’re undaunted by the chance to problem the established order of our roads, and we’re proud to proceed serving San Franciscan residents and guests.”