An autopsy from Waymo on Tuesday provides at least some clarity about what happened to the poor, San Francisco operation after most of the power went out across the city on Saturday.
Waymo’s behavior at black stops has forced the Alphabet subsidiary to call all of its San Francisco robots home, a disaster of sorts. But to be fair, the social media posts probably made Waymo’s solution look more disorganized than it really was, giving the impression that all Waymos in San Francisco were fired at the same time for whatever caused the outage, causing them to stop in place, including at busy intersections, as if their robot drivers had been snatched away for punishment.
The power outage brought out the waymos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku
— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025
Sure there were congested roads and blocked intersections, but below is Waymo’s preferred framing of how the problem arose. Note that in its comms, Waymo calls the self-driving software in its vehicles “Waymo Driver.”
“Although Waymo Driver is designed to handle black traffic signals like four stops, sometimes it may ask for a verification check to make sure it is making the safest choice. Although we managed to pass more than 7,000 black signals on Saturday, the end of the problem has created a large concentration of these requests. This has created a backlog that, in some cases, has led to delayed responses on the road already.”
It seems very important to Waymo’s brand not to give the impression that Waymos are remotely operated. What Waymo has instead of “remote drivers” or “teleoperators” is called “fleet response,” a Waymo blog post says. When a Waymo driver encounters a truly unique driving situation, we send it to a human answer, which we should not think of as a bailout. It might want confirmation about, say, it suspects it’s a completely impassable intersection, and the human operator sends signals to direct it where it might want to go.
“Fleet response can influence Waymo’s driver’s approach, either indirectly by indicating a lane closure, by explicitly asking the AV to use a certain route, or, in more complex cases, clearly suggesting the direction the vehicle should take,” says the Waymo blog about Fleet Response. You may assume this or ignore the input of “remote operator” or “teleoperator.” Apparently Waymo doesn’t do that.
In any case, all these empty Waymos at black stops in San Francisco on Saturday created a lot of these requests for a human response, and Waymo’s postmortem examination admits that the traffic caused even worse traffic.
So what Waymo says happened next appears to be a reasonable course of action for causing traffic jams during the blackout: “We ordered our fleet to move and park properly so that we could return vehicles to our depots in waves.
On the outside, and especially on social media, this part looked worse than it actually was. Posts showing Waymos at an intersection may appear next to posts showing Waymos standing on the side of the road. This makes it look like San Francisco was a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of dead robots. It makes sense to ask: if they didn’t die why didn’t the company send them home? But it also makes sense that Waymo would want to avoid the critical mass of Waymos disrupting San Francisco like a herd of trampling wild animals, and thus making cars simply wait on the side of the road until their team is called.
This created another bad look for Waymo: beside the Waymos that turned into obstacles, there were at least a bunch of people. safely parked Waymos, not leaving, but just waiting for the signal to return to their depots in an orderly manner.
6 Waymo parked a broken traffic light blocking the roads. It seems they were not trained for power outages pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe
– Walden (@walden_yan) December 21, 2025
No future plans were mentioned in the postmortem about introducing remote drivers. What future plans are included, rather confusingly, don’t include anything—at least so far—about changing Waymo Driver’s basic driving software at all. Three letters about Waymo’s “way forward” all focus on emergencies: “Gathering more information about outages,” “Reviewing our emergency preparedness and response,” and “Increasing our engagement with first responders.”
Robotaxis is programmed to drive recklessly, and thus has a track record of behavior similar to general boy-checking, but this autopsy does not at all indicate that Waymo is showing that these are aliens on our roads that will misbehave and fail in entirely new and unpredictable ways. In fact, it ends on a defiant note, saying “we don’t shy away from an opportunity to challenge the state of our streets, and we’re proud to continue serving San Franciscan residents and visitors.”
