Waymo released a revealing postmortem on its San Francisco power outage crisis

A Waymo postmortem Tuesday offers at least some clarity on what happened to its poor, obscure San Francisco operations after much of the city’s power was cut Saturday.

Waymo’s behavior at dark red lights forced the Alphabet-owned company to call all of its San Francisco robotaxis home, a logistical disaster. But in fairness, the social media posts probably made Waymo’s ad hoc solution seem even more haphazard than it actually was, making it appear as if all the Waymos in San Francisco had been zapped at once by the cause of the outage, forcing them to stop in place, including at busy intersections, as if their robot drivers had been transported to robot heaven.

A power outage took away the Waymos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku

– Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025

There were certainly choked streets and blocked intersectionsbut here’s how Waymo prefers to describe how the problem occurred. Note that in its communications, Waymo refers to its cars’ self-driving software as “Waymo Driver.”

“Although Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic lights like four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it is making the safest choice. Although we successfully navigated more than 7,000 dark lights on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated increase in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already congested streets.”

It seems very important for the Waymo brand to never leave the impression that Waymos are controlled remotely. What Waymo offers instead of “remote drivers” or “teleoperators” is called “”fleet response,” says a Waymo blog post. When the Waymo driver encounters a truly heterogeneous driving situation, it sends human calls. back, which we are not supposed to consider as a bailout. He may want confirmation, for example, of what he suspects is a completely impassable intersection, and a human operator sends back signals telling him where he might want to go.

“Fleet Response can influence the Waymo driver’s path, whether indirectly by indicating lane closures, explicitly directing the utility vehicle to use a particular lane, or, in more complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider,” the Waymo blog on Fleet Response states. You might or might not think of this as the entry of a “remote driver” or “teleoperator.” Waymo clearly doesn’t do this.

Regardless, all those furtive Waymos at running red lights in San Francisco on Saturday created a traffic jam of these human comment requests, and Waymo’s post-mortem acknowledges that this traffic jam caused even worse traffic.

So what Waymo says happened next appears to be a reasonable course of action in response to the traffic caused 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 helped ensure that we did not add more to congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles at the height of the recovery effort.”

From the outside, and especially on social media, this is the part that seemed worse than it actually was. Posts showing Waymos at intersections could be seen next to posts showing Waymos stopped at the side of the road. It made San Francisco feel like a post-apocalyptic wasteland dotted with dead robotaxis. It is 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 fleeing wildebeest, and thus forcing vehicles to wait on the side of the road until their group is called.

This created an additional bad image for Waymo: alongside the Waymos that became obstacles, there were at least a few crowds of people. parked safely Waymos, no problem, but just waiting for the signal to return to their depots in an orderly manner.

6 Waymo is parked at a broken light blocking the roads. Looks like they weren’t trained for a power outage pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe

– Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025

There are no future plans mentioned in the post mortem regarding the introduction of remote drivers. The future plans included, rather confusingly, do not include anything – at least so far – about changing Waymo Driver’s fundamental driving software. The three points on Waymo’s “way forward” all focus on emergencies: “Incorporating more outage information,” “Updating our emergency preparedness and response,” and “Expanding our first responder engagement.”

Robotaxis are programmed to drive conservatively and therefore have overall scout-like behavior, but this post-mortem doesn’t show that Waymo gives any thought to the fact that these are aliens on our roads who will misbehave and fail in entirely new and unpredictable ways. In fact, it ends on a defiant note, saying, “We are not intimidated by the opportunity to challenge the status quo of our roadways, and we are proud to continue serving San Franciscan residents and visitors.” »