Waymo has released a revealing postmortem of the blackout meltdown in San Francisco

Tuesday’s autopsy by Waymo offers at least some clarity about what the hell happened to its poor, backwater operation in San Francisco after much of the city’s power went out Saturday.

Waymo’s behavior at dark traffic lights forced the Alphabet-owned company to call all of its San Francisco robotics back home, a logistical disaster. But honestly, the social media posts probably made Waymo’s ad-hoc decision seem even more random than it actually was, giving the impression that all of San Francisco’s Waymos were simultaneously locked out of whatever caused the outage, causing them to stop in place, including at busy intersections, as if their robot drivers had been raptured into robo-heaven.

A power failure disabled the waymos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku

— Vincent Wu (@fulligin) December 21, 2025

There were certainly congested streets and blocked intersections, but below is how Waymo prefers to present how the problem occurred. Note that in its announcements, Waymo refers to the self-driving software in its cars as « Waymo Driver. »

« Although Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals like four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to make sure it’s making the safest choice. Although we successfully went through more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in those requests. This created a backlog that in some cases caused delays in response, contributing to congestion on already congested streets. »

It seems very important to Waymo’s brand to never give the impression that Waymo is ever remotely controlled. What Waymo has instead of « remote drivers » or « teleoperators » is called « fleet response, » Waymo said in a blog post. When Waymo Driver encounters a truly heterogeneous driving situation, it sends for a human feedback, which we should not perceive as a rescue plan. It might ask for confirmation of, say, what it suspects is a completely impassable intersection, and a human operator sends signals directing it where it might want to go.

« Fleet response can affect a Waymo driver’s path, whether indirectly by indicating a lane closure, explicitly asking the AV to use a certain lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly suggesting a path for the vehicle to consider, » Waymo’s Fleet Response blog post says. You may or may not consider this a « remote driver » or « teleoperator » input. Waymo apparently doesn’t.

In any case, all those secret Waymos at the blacked-out traffic lights in San Francisco on Saturday created a traffic jam from these requests for human feedback, and Waymo’s post-mortem admits the traffic jam caused even worse traffic.

So what Waymo says happened next seems like a reasonable course of action in response to causing traffic during a power outage: « We directed our fleet to stop and park appropriately so that we could return vehicles to our depots in waves. This ensured that we did not further increase congestion or impede emergency vehicles during the peak of recovery efforts. »

From the outside, and especially on social media, this is the part that looked worse than it actually was. Posts showing Waymos at intersections can be seen next to posts showing Waymos stopped on the side of the road. So it looked like San Francisco was a post-apocalyptic wasteland littered with dead robotics. It is reasonable to ask: if they weren’t dead why didn’t the company send them home? But it also makes sense for Waymo to want to avoid a critical mass of Waymos disrupting San Francisco like a herd of wild beasts on the run, and thus causing vehicles to simply wait on the side of the road until their group is called.

This created an additional bad look for Waymo: Along with the Waymos that became roadblocks, there were at least some mobs of safely parked Waymos, they don’t disappear, they just wait for the signal to return to their depots in an orderly manner.

6 Waymo parks at a broken traffic light blocking roads. It seems they were not trained for power outages pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe

— Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025

There are no future plans mentioned in the postmortem to introduce remote drivers. What future plans are included, rather puzzlingly, don’t include anything – at least so far – about changing Waymo Driver’s core software at all. Waymo’s three bullets for the « way forward » focus on emergencies: « Integrate more outage information, » « Update emergency preparedness and response, » and « Expand our commitment to first responders. »

Robotaxis are programmed to drive conservatively and thus have aggregated data on Boy Scout-like behavior, but this autopsychology doesn’t show that Waymo is even considering the fact that these are aliens on our roads who will misbehave and fail in entirely new ways that cannot be predicted. In fact, it ends on a note of challenge, saying that « we are not afraid of the opportunity to challenge the status quo on our roads and are proud to continue serving the residents and visitors of San Francisco. »