Neil Freiman

Traffic lights were down.

Hundreds of self-driving robot cars malfunctioned in the middle of the street, creating gridlock.

But this wasn't science fiction.

It was San Francisco on Saturday.

A power blackout hit around 125,000 homes and businesses in SF, impacting about a third of the city due to a fire at a substation at Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

But this being 2025 in the most tech-forward U.S.

metropolis, the blackout had some bizarre knock-on effects, like rendering Waymo's self-driving cars inoperable.

On Saturday, people shared tons of viral videos of Waymo's stalled out at busy intersections, one after another, causing major traffic jams behind them.

As of last night, Waymo had resumed its robotaxi service, but the reputational damage was done.

The company said that its problems stemmed from all the traffic lights going down.

A spokesperson said, while the Waymo driver is designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops, the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections.

This contributed to traffic friction during the height of the congestion.

It's not a good look for a startup that was just starting to win hearts and minds in San Francisco and beyond after working hard to overcome initial skepticism from human drivers.

Toby, this debacle will only fuel the critics who say robo taxis aren't ready for prime time.

Now, this isn't going to help matters when it comes to broader skepticism around self-driving cars.

There was a survey by AAA in early 2025 that showed that 66% of drivers in the United States felt fearful and 25% felt uncertain about autonomous vehicles.

I do feel like Waymo had earned a little more respect from San Francisco and several other of the cities that it's operating in because it's published these safety statistics showing that it's so much safer than human drivers and the rollout of robo-taxis could lead to tens of thousands of lives saved.

Waymo's own data says that it's 80 to 90% safer

than human drivers.

And I feel like it had built up a little credibility.