Power outage took out Wemos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku
– Vincent Wu (@fulligin) 21 December 2025
Waymo spokeswoman Suzanne Fillion issued a statement around 7:00 p.m. saying service was “temporarily suspended” due to the outage. “We’re focused on keeping our riders safe and making sure emergency personnel have clear access to do their jobs,” Fillion said.
6 Waymo parked at a broken traffic light blocking the roads. Looks like they weren’t trained for power outages pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe
– Walden (@walden_yan) 21 December 2025
As of Sunday morning, there was no update from Waymo on whether the company’s robotaxis were still not operational, nor on what caused the problem in the first place.
Gizmodo asked Waymo whether vehicles were having trouble passing blacked-out stoplights, or whether the problem had to do with data reception or transmission. We also asked the company if any Waymo vehicles are still blocking roads. We’ll update if we hear back. ,UPDATE: Waymo provided a statement, which has been added to the end of this article)
Until there’s some kind of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned company, there’s no way to be completely sure that the problem wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type situation in which the nerve center of the robot hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old kid, leaving all the robots dead.
Companies like Waymo position themselves as harbingers of a safer future on the roads, offering statistics such as 82% fewer crashes when airbags deploy, and 92% fewer pedestrian injuries than human drivers.
Power outages in SF and @waymoDue to this, there is heavy traffic jam in North Beach. pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma
– Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) 21 December 2025
Bad wemo has blocked roads due to power outages all across SF 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/CAsSxFroX3
– @Jason (@Jason) 21 December 2025
But, as a San Francisco Waymo crushed a locally famous cat named Kit Kat in October, the issue may come down to the fact that Waymos overall are better or worse than humans.Obotes fail in unexpected, exotic waysActual footage of Kit Kat’s fatal injury shows one such example, A human driver probably wouldn’t do what is seen happening in the video: Start from a closed spot while a person is actively trying to get a cat out from under their car,
Similarly, human drivers do not suddenly go offline en masse when a blackout occurs.
Updated at 7:12 pm ET. A Waymo spokesperson provided the following statement:
“We are resuming ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with traffic signals not working and transit disrupted. While the failure of utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring that our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events.
“Throughout the outage, we coordinated closely with San Francisco city officials. We are focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned from this incident, and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day.”
A parenthesis has also been added above indicating that Waymo has responded to Gizmodo.
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