Waymo cars stopped, blocking traffic, during San Francisco power outage

An hourslong power outage in San Francisco over the weekend that caused tens of thousands of households to lose electricity also knocked out Waymo service, with the ubiquitous self-driving cars coming to a halt at darkened traffic signals, blocking traffic and angering drivers of regular vehicles that became stuck as a result.

The ride-hailing service remained offline for part of Sunday, and tow truck operators said they had been towing Waymos for hours overnight. Social media was littered with videos of the vehicles at blocked intersections with their hazard lights blinking.

The company temporarily suspended its ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, a Waymo spokesperson said in an email. It resumed Sunday afternoon.

A representative from the San Francisco mayor’s office and the Waymo spokesperson said the decision to suspend services occurred after the mayor’s team contacted the company about the significant gridlock its cars were contributing to.

Nearly 19,000 electricity customers in San Francisco remained without power on Sunday afternoon, according to the site PowerOutage.com. Pacific Gas & Electric, the local utility, said on social media that it expected to have all power restored by 2 p.m. Monday.

Waymo, owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, came to San Francisco in 2023, and now has about 1,000 vehicles roaming the streets.

But the deployment of vehicles in the Bay Area has not come without problems, including one taxi making an illegal U-turn and another running over a beloved neighborhood cat.

The malfunctions this weekend are especially curious, experts said, because Waymo and other self-driving car companies design their vehicles so they can continue to operate when they lose access to wireless networks or when they encounter traffic lights that have lost power.

Poor weather often knocks out traffic lights in San Francisco, and typically, this does not cause problems with the operation of self-driving cars like Waymos. These cars, which are powered by onboard batteries, are also designed to drive in areas where they temporarily lose access to a wireless signal.

Like other self-driving cars, Waymo’s vehicles do encounter situations where they need access to wireless networks. Waymo and other companies employ remote technicians who can help these cars deal with problems that they cannot solve on their own.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.