Another Week, Another Pause: Waymo Pulled Its Robotaxis Off San Francisco Streets

Another Week, Another Pause: Waymo Pulled Its Robotaxis Off San Francisco Streets—Again

Another Week, Another Pause: Waymo Pulled Its Robotaxis Off San Francisco Streets—Again

Philip Uwaoma

Fri, December 26, 2025 at 2:15 PM UTC

Waymo's autonomously driven Jaguar I-PACE electric SUV — Image Credit: Waymo.

SAN FRANCISCO — On Christmas Day, as a powerful Pacific storm unleashed heavy rain and flash-flood warnings across the Bay Area, ride-hail giant Waymo temporarily suspended its fully autonomous robotaxi service once again in San Francisco and surrounding communities.

The pause, communicated to customers via the Waymo app with a terse alert citing a National Weather Service flash flood warning, comes in the wake of growing pains and public safety questions facing autonomous vehicles as they scale into complex urban environments.

The service interruption came amid a broader atmospheric river system lashing Northern California with drenching rains, damaging winds, and ongoing flood and tornado advisories — weather conditions that have already led to localized flooding, downed trees, and travel delays across the region on one of the year’s busiest travel weekends.

A Second Interruption in a Week

Waymo autonomous car. — Image Credit: Daniel Ramirez from Honolulu, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia.

This latest halt isn’t an isolated glitch: earlier in the week, a large power outage triggered by a fire at a Pacific Gas & Electric substation knocked out electricity to roughly one-third of San Francisco, leaving tens of thousands of homes in darkness and hundreds of Waymo vehicles stalled in traffic.

During that blackout, with traffic signals across the city dead, Waymo’s autonomous cars treated non-functioning lights as four-way stops (their standard programming) but in many cases requested remote "confirmation checks" from fleet operators before proceeding.

Videos widely shared on social media showed robotaxis motionless at intersections, hazard lights blinking, contributing to congestion as frustrated human drivers maneuvered around them. City officials, including San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, urged the company to clear its vehicles so emergency responders could navigate more effectively amid the outage.

Waymo’s response to that incident was to temporarily suspend service Saturday evening until power was restored and traffic signals came back online. The company said it was working closely with government and emergency management officials on the outage but acknowledged that the sheer scale of the disruption had overwhelmed its systems.

In the days since, Waymo has begun rolling out fleet-wide software updates intended to give its autonomous vehicles better context for handling large infrastructure failures, enabling more decisive navigation through darkened intersections without over-reliance on remote human confirmation checks that can bog down system responsiveness in mass outages.

Technology Meets Nature

Flooded car park in Stafford. — Image Credit: Jonathan Hutchins, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia.

The intersection of weather extremes and autonomous technology is now at the center of news circle debates over how robotaxi systems handle real-world emergencies. Severe weather, power outages, and other atypical road conditions are precisely the kind of edge cases that still challenge even the most advanced artificial intelligence driving systems.

“Malfunctioning infrastructure like dead traffic lights during a power outage should be a routine problem for self-driving cars, but the incident exposed the potential safety risks when robotaxis lose contact with their remote human operators,” wrote analysts covering the December outage (as reported by Axios), noting that in a major natural disaster such as an earthquake or flood, a fleet of frozen autonomous vehicles could hamper emergency response.

San Francisco regulators, including the California Public Utilities Commission and Department of Motor Vehicles, said they were reviewing the power-outage incident for implications on future robotaxi operations.

Public Trust and Policy Pressure

Public sentiment in the city has been mixed. While autonomous taxis promise reduced crashes and expanded mobility — and Waymo notes its vehicles have logged millions of autonomous miles with safety improvements compared with human drivers — the optics of stalled robotaxis during a major outage has reignited skepticism about their readiness for widespread urban deployment.

City officials and transit advocates are now asking pointed questions: What systems are in place for vehicles to proactively pull off busy roads? How should autonomous fleets behave during severe weather warnings? And what regulatory conditions should govern the density and timing of robotaxi operations in dense, infrastructure-dependent urban cores?

One transit expert quoted on LinkedIn suggested regulators and industry partners reevaluate how many autonomous vehicles are allowed on city streets and ensure robust protocols for weather and emergency scenarios — possibly including fallback human intervention — before full scale deployment. “I think we need to be asking ‘what is a reasonable number of [autonomous vehicles] to have on city streets, by time of day, by geography and weather?’” they said.

As the winter storm continues to impact the Bay Area, Waymo’s Christmas-Day pause underscores a critical truth about autonomous systems: despite billions of miles of development and machine learning, they still operate within (and depend upon) an imperfect human infrastructure. The tech may be autonomous, but the environment it must navigate is anything but predictable.

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