Waymo’s driverless taxi network is facing its most serious credibility test yet after a mass “bricking” incident in San Francisco was followed within days by another widespread shutdown. What was supposed to be a showcase of seamless autonomy instead turned into a rolling traffic jam, with stalled robotaxis blocking intersections and confusing human drivers. The back-to-back failures have turned a technical glitch into a broader referendum on whether self-driving fleets are ready for the messy realities of city life.
The company now finds itself racing to reassure regulators, riders, and residents that its software can handle crises without freezing in place. The latest outage, coming so soon after the blackout chaos, has sharpened questions about how Waymo designs its safety logic, how it communicates with the public, and whether its promise of safer streets is being undercut by very visible breakdowns.
Another shutdown after the “bricking” fiasco
The most recent shutdown unfolded just days after a mass immobilization of Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, when dozens of robotaxis reportedly stopped moving and effectively “bricked” in the middle of active streets. In the follow-on incident, a fresh wave of cars again halted service, leaving riders stranded and intersections cluttered as the fleet abruptly went offline. The pattern, a cascading failure followed by another stoppage before the first crisis was fully digested, has turned what might have been dismissed as a one-off bug into a sign of deeper fragility inside the system.
Witness accounts and images described clusters of Waymo cars sitting motionless, hazard lights blinking, while confused motorists tried to weave around them and even other Waymos struggled to navigate the gridlock. One report framed it as “a run of bad luck,” but the scenes of stalled vehicles blocking lanes, frustrating cyclists, and forcing human drivers into awkward maneuvers suggested something more systemic than misfortune. The company’s own admission that its fleet had to be shut down again, after the earlier mass bricking, underscored how quickly a software miscalculation can ripple across hundreds of vehicles and turn a city’s streets into a test lab for unfinished code, a dynamic captured in coverage of the Waymo shuts down again episode.
How the San Francisco blackout exposed a design flaw
The trouble started in earnest during a major power outage in San Francisco, when traffic lights across the city went dark and the robotaxis’ carefully mapped expectations collided with a suddenly unstructured environment. Waymo’s vehicles were programmed to treat dark signals as four-way stops, a conservative rule that might work at a handful of intersections but quickly broke down when thousands of lights failed at once. With every junction effectively downgraded to an all-way stop, the cars crept forward, hesitated, and in many cases simply froze, turning already stressed intersections into bottlenecks.
Company engineers later acknowledged that this cautious behavior had been effective during smaller outages, but the blackout created roughly 7,000 dark signals in a single day, a scale the system had never encountered. The result was a fleet that defaulted to maximum caution, then ran out of options, leaving Waymo cars stuck in the middle of intersections or refusing to proceed even when it was safe. In a postmortem, the company said it would roll out fleet-wide updates so that, instead of treating every dark light identically, the software could reason more flexibly about traffic flow and move more decisively when conditions allowed, a shift described in detail when Waymo explained why its robotaxis got stuck and how it planned to adjust after facing those 7,000 dark signals.
Gridlock, blocked roads, and shaken confidence
On the ground, the blackout turned into a stress test that Waymo failed in full public view. In a city where hundreds of Waymos are on the road at any given time, the decision of so many vehicles to stop in place or inch forward unpredictably had an outsized impact on traffic. Human drivers reported being trapped behind lines of robotaxis that would not clear intersections, while pedestrians and cyclists watched as the cars hesitated in crosswalks or stopped short of making turns, compounding the confusion already caused by the loss of power.
One detailed account described how Waymos blocked roads and caused chaos during the San Francisco power outage, with some vehicles entering intersections and then failing to cross, effectively sealing off key arteries. The phrase “Waymos Blocked Roads and Caused Chaos During San Francisco Power Outage” captured the mood among residents who suddenly found their commutes and emergency routes obstructed by vehicles that were supposed to be smarter and safer than human drivers. That same report, which repeated the line “Waymos Blocked Roads and Caused Chaos During” to emphasize the scale of disruption, underscored how quickly public patience can erode when a high-tech service becomes a source of gridlock instead of relief, a dynamic that played out vividly as Waymos Blocked Roads and Caused Chaos During San Francisco Power Outage.
Waymo’s promised software fixes and fleet-wide updates
In response to the blackout debacle and the subsequent shutdown, Waymo has promised a series of software changes that it says will make its fleet more resilient when infrastructure fails. The company said in a blog post that it is implementing changes to its driverless cars for times when “infrastructure” is compromised, a clear reference to the dark traffic signals that paralyzed its vehicles. The goal is to give the system more nuanced decision-making so that it can balance caution with the need to keep traffic moving, rather than defaulting to a universal four-way stop rule that collapses under citywide stress.
Waymo has also committed to rolling out fleet-wide updates across San Francisco so that its vehicles can better interpret complex intersections and proceed when it is safe, even if signals are not behaving as expected. The company said its vehicles successfully navigated many parts of the city during the outage but conceded that the blackout exposed edge cases where the software did not know how to prioritize movement over stasis. By pushing new logic to every car, Waymo is betting that it can turn a very public failure into a learning moment, a strategy it outlined while discussing how it would update its driverless fleet after the San Francisco outage and how those changes to its fleet of driverless cars are meant to reduce gridlock.
Safety record under scrutiny: wrong-way driving and past tragedies
The twin shutdowns did not occur in a vacuum, they landed on top of a safety record that is already under intense scrutiny. Beyond tragedies like earlier collisions involving autonomous vehicles, Waymo’s cabs have been spotted more than occasionally driving down the wrong side of the road, edging into oncoming lanes, or making awkward maneuvers that leave human drivers guessing. Each viral clip of a robotaxi behaving strangely chips away at the narrative that these systems are inherently safer and more predictable than people behind the wheel.
Critics argue that while isolated incidents might be tolerable in a pilot program, they become far more concerning when scaled across a commercial fleet that operates in dense urban neighborhoods. The recent mass bricking event, followed by another shutdown, has amplified those concerns by showing how a software misjudgment can immobilize dozens of vehicles at once. One analysis noted that, beyond the headline-grabbing tragedies, the accumulation of wrong-way driving reports and stalled cars paints a picture of a technology that still struggles with rare but high-stakes scenarios, a pattern highlighted in coverage that stressed how, Beyond tragedies like those, even seemingly minor missteps can become dangerous at scale.
Emergency readiness and the crisis playbook
The San Francisco blackout and the subsequent shutdown have raised a sharper question that goes beyond traffic convenience, whether robotaxis can be trusted during genuine emergencies. When power fails, roads flood, or earthquakes hit, cities need vehicles that can adapt quickly, clear paths for ambulances, and avoid becoming obstacles. Instead, Waymo’s cars became part of the problem, blocking intersections and forcing first responders to navigate around clusters of stalled vehicles at a moment when every second can matter.
Experts in disaster planning have warned that any large fleet of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous vehicles must be integrated into a city’s emergency protocols, not operate as a parallel system that may or may not cooperate when things go wrong. Reporting from San Francisco captured this tension, noting that the outage raised doubts over robotaxi readiness during crises such as earthquakes and floods, and that local officials are now weighing whether additional oversight or operational limits are needed when infrastructure is under stress. The episode has turned Waymo’s San Francisco outage into a case study in how not to manage a crisis, prompting calls for clearer rules on how driverless fleets should behave during citywide disruptions and how they can avoid compounding the risks that emergencies like earthquakes and floods already pose.
Public messaging, rider alerts, and the human factor
Waymo’s technical response has been matched by a scramble to manage expectations among riders who suddenly found their go-to robotaxi service unavailable. During the latest shutdown, the company reportedly sent a notification through its Waymo cars app telling customers that “Service” would be paused, a blunt message that left many scrambling for alternatives late at night. The alert, which referenced a specific cutoff time and acknowledged that vehicles would not be available after that point, underscored how dependent some users have become on the service for commuting, nightlife, and even late-shift work.
At the same time, the blackout and its aftermath have become fodder for social media clips and short news videos, including a Today News Update segment that described how a widespread power outage in San Francisco disrupted operations of Waymo’s self-driving taxis. Those images of stalled cars and confused riders have spread far beyond the Bay Area, shaping national perceptions of the technology. For a company that has invested heavily in branding itself as a safe, reliable alternative to human drivers, the optics of sending out abrupt “Service” shutdown notices and appearing in viral reels about gridlock are a serious setback, as illustrated by coverage of how some Americans may be earning by helping Google’s Waymo robotaxis and the specific alert that Waymo cars app stating, “Service” would be halted landed with riders.
Waymo’s narrative versus what San Francisco saw
Officially, Waymo has emphasized that its vehicles are designed to prioritize safety above all else, even if that means stopping in place when conditions are unclear. The company points to internal data suggesting that its cars avoid many of the human errors that cause crashes, and it has argued that, in a city with hundreds of Waymos on the road, the safest choice in a confusing situation is often to pause and wait. From this perspective, the mass stoppages are a feature, not a bug, evidence that the system refuses to bluff its way through uncertainty.
Residents and local drivers, however, experienced something very different during the blackout and the subsequent shutdown. To them, the sight of clusters of robotaxis frozen in intersections, or creeping forward only to stop again, looked less like prudence and more like paralysis. A widely shared Today News Update clip described how the San Francisco outage disrupted operations of Waymo’s self-driving taxis, capturing the frustration of people who suddenly found their streets clogged by vehicles that would not commit to a decision. That disconnect between Waymo’s narrative of cautious safety and the lived reality of gridlock is now at the heart of the debate over whether the company’s current approach to risk is compatible with the fluid, improvisational nature of city traffic, a tension that was on display when a Today News Update described the outage’s impact on San Francisco.
What the back-to-back failures mean for robotaxis
The rapid sequence of a mass bricking event followed by another shutdown has turned Waymo’s San Francisco operations into a bellwether for the entire robotaxi industry. If one of the most advanced autonomous fleets in the world can be brought to a standstill by a power outage and a software miscalculation, regulators and city planners are bound to ask whether similar services should be allowed to expand without stricter safeguards. The outages have already prompted calls for clearer rules on how and when companies must pull vehicles off the road, how they should coordinate with emergency services, and what kind of redundancy is required to prevent a single point of failure from immobilizing an entire fleet.
For Waymo, the stakes are especially high because San Francisco has been a flagship market, a place where the company hoped to prove that driverless taxis could coexist with dense traffic, complex intersections, and unpredictable human behavior. Instead, the city has become a showcase for the technology’s current limits, from wrong-way driving incidents to cars that freeze when infrastructure behaves unexpectedly. The company’s promised fleet-wide updates, its public explanations of what went wrong, and its efforts to rebuild trust will now be watched closely not just by riders and residents, but by officials across the country who are deciding how far and how fast to let robotaxis scale. In a city with hundreds of Waymos on the road at any given time, the question is no longer whether the technology can work in ideal conditions, but whether it can be trusted when the lights go out, a concern that has driven Waymo to roll out fleet-wide updates aimed at helping its vehicles navigate more decisively when infrastructure fails.
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