On December 20, 2025, a fire at PG&E’s Mission substation triggered a widespread San Francisco power outage. Traffic signals went dark across affected areas, and some Waymo robotaxis remained stopped at intersections long enough to worsen congestion. Waymo temporarily suspended Bay Area ride-hailing service that evening, then resumed it on December 21.
The incident was not a total fleet shutdown or proof that Waymo vehicles could not recognize dead traffic lights. Later regulatory and company accounts point to a more specific failure mode: an unusually large number of simultaneous dark-signal situations generated a surge in requests for remote confirmation, lengthening response times for some vehicles.
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What happened during the December 20 blackout?
The outage began on Saturday, December 20, 2025, after a fire at PG&E’s Mission substation. At its peak, the disruption affected nearly one-third of San Francisco, with approximately 130,000 customers reported without power. Many traffic signals in affected neighborhoods also went dark, while BART, Muni and other transportation services experienced disruptions.
Officials told drivers to treat dark traffic signals as four-way stops and urged people to avoid nonessential travel. The Waymo vehicles were therefore operating in a citywide transportation emergency, not an ordinary driving environment. PG&E’s account attributes the outage to the substation fire, while transit reporting from the Los Angeles Times describes the broader disruption.
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The outage was widespread, but it was not necessarily total across every San Francisco neighborhood. Similarly, not every traffic signal or Waymo vehicle was affected.
Why were some Waymos stopped?
Photos and videos posted during the outage showed multiple Waymo vehicles stopped in traffic lanes or at intersections, sometimes with their hazard lights operating. Human drivers maneuvered around some stationary cars, adding to congestion and raising concerns about access for emergency vehicles.
The best-supported description is that a subset of vehicles stopped or waited unusually long. Available reporting does not establish that hundreds of Waymos were stranded or that the entire fleet became immobilized.
Waymo suspended ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area at approximately 5:55 p.m. on December 20, according to a later California Public Utilities Commission filing. That suspension stopped new ride-hailing activity; it was separate from the behavior of vehicles that were already on the road.
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Dark traffic lights were not simply invisible objects
Waymo says its vehicles are designed to treat a completely dark traffic signal as a four-way stop, broadly following the rule expected of human drivers. That means the incident should not be summarized as “the cars could not see the lights” or “the AI did not know what a dark signal meant.”
The harder problem was uncertainty at scale. A single dark signal can be handled as a four-way stop. But a dark signal combined with heavy cross traffic, pedestrians, police direction, temporary road controls, blocked lanes or several adjacent failed signals creates a more complicated decision. During the blackout, many such situations occurred at the same time.
A vehicle that waits for more information may reduce the chance of entering an ambiguous intersection. But stopping in the wrong place, or remaining stopped for too long, can create a different hazard by blocking lanes and prompting human drivers to make evasive maneuvers. In this event, caution at individual intersections contributed to a fleet-level traffic problem.
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Waymo vehicles can request help from remote-assistance personnel when they need additional confirmation about whether proceeding is safe. The available evidence describes this as assistance or confirmation—not remote driving. It does not support the claim that human operators manually drove the stranded vehicles.
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The CPUC filing says confirmation requests began exceeding normal levels at approximately 5 p.m. As the outage affected many signals at once, more vehicles encountered conditions that required additional verification. Response times increased, and some cars remained stationary while waiting for requests to be addressed.
This distinction matters. The vehicles’ onboard systems were not necessarily unable to perceive the intersection or plan a route. Instead, the wider operating system encountered an unusually high volume of correlated exceptions. The visible result—a car sitting at an intersection—looked like a conventional software failure, but the reported mechanism involved the interaction between onboard decision-making, remote assistance and a citywide infrastructure event.
It was a partial disruption, not a total shutdown
Waymo later said its vehicles successfully navigated more than 7,000 dark signals during the outage. That number is a company-reported figure, not an independently audited result, but it reinforces the more precise account: many vehicles continued operating while a subset experienced prolonged waits.
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Waymo subsequently said it was rolling out fleet-wide software changes intended to give vehicles more context about regional outages and help them make decisions at affected intersections more decisively. That is a company-described remediation, not evidence that the update has been independently validated during a comparable blackout.
What is confirmed—and what is not?
| Question | What the evidence supports |
|---|---|
| Did the outage affect Waymo vehicles? | Yes. Some vehicles stopped or waited unusually long at dark intersections, contributing to congestion. |
| Did every Waymo stop? | No. Waymo said vehicles crossed more than 7,000 dark signals, and the evidence describes a subset of vehicles. |
| Could the vehicles handle dark signals? | Waymo says they were designed to treat dark signals as four-way stops. |
| Did remote operators drive them? | The available material supports remote assistance or confirmation, not remote-controlled driving. |
| Did cellular failure cause the incident? | Degraded connectivity was discussed as a possibility, but the authoritative account does not establish it as the root cause. |
| Were injuries caused by the Waymos? | The reviewed reports document congestion and blocked traffic, but do not establish an injury toll attributable to the stoppages. |
| Did Tesla provide a controlled comparison? | No. Claims that Tesla robotaxis were unaffected were statements by Elon Musk, not a controlled head-to-head test. |
The larger lesson is fleet resilience
The blackout does not prove that autonomous vehicles cannot handle emergencies. It does show that a robotaxi fleet must be evaluated under correlated failures, not only isolated edge cases.
One vehicle encountering one dark signal is a local autonomy problem. Thousands of abnormal intersections appearing across a service area at the same time become an operations problem as well:
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- Remote-assistance capacity: Can the system handle a sudden, simultaneous surge in confirmation requests?
- Service suspension: When should new trips be blocked, and what happens to passengers already aboard?
- Vehicle recovery: How are stationary cars identified, cleared and repositioned?
- Emergency coordination: Can operators quickly share vehicle locations with police, fire crews and transportation agencies?
- Safe stopping: Does a vehicle stop in a position that preserves emergency access and avoids blocking a lane or intersection?
- Recovery: What conditions must be met before service resumes?
A mature emergency protocol would distinguish between a single failed signal, several adjacent failed signals, a blackout combined with heavy pedestrian traffic, and a communications outage that limits remote assistance. It would also define whether vehicles should continue cautiously, pull over, complete existing trips, or stop accepting new requests.
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The CPUC follow-up material and a San Francisco County Transportation Authority board memorandum show why the event became a regulatory and emergency-preparedness issue rather than merely a viral-video story. Cities permitting autonomous fleets may reasonably ask operators to test blackouts, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, signal failures and degraded communications before declaring the service resilient.
What the San Francisco incident does—and does not—prove
It does show that a city-scale infrastructure failure can create fleet-level operational stress even when individual vehicles have a rule for handling dark traffic signals. It also shows that “stopped” is not automatically synonymous with “safe”: waiting may avoid an unsafe intersection decision, while a prolonged stop can obstruct traffic and emergency movement.
It does not prove that Waymo vehicles were unable to detect dead lights, that every robotaxi failed, that cellular disruption was the root cause, or that remote humans were driving the cars. Nor does it provide reliable evidence that another robotaxi system is more resilient simply because a company representative said its vehicles were unaffected.
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The practical standard is broader than whether one autonomous car can navigate one unusual intersection. A dependable autonomous fleet must recognize when normal assumptions have broken down, fail in a way that does not block critical routes, scale its assistance systems during a correlated emergency, communicate clearly with the public and officials, and recover without adding a second transportation crisis to the first.
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