Waymo robotaxi “lost” its way during San Francisco blackout

Waymo robotaxi’s passengers became victims of the power outage that affected San Francisco, California.

The city-wide power outage in San Francisco has also affected Waymo, the company that offers driverless taxi services.

The outage, which occurred in San Francisco, California, after 1 p.m. on Saturday, December 20th, also caused inconvenience for Waymo passengers.

The outage caused the company’s cars to stop in the middle of the ride, causing traffic disruptions.

The problem occurred when the city's traffic lights shut down due to the blackout, forcing several cars to stop in the middle of the street.

Waymo cars stopped too, causing even further disruption to traffic.

The reason for this could be that the company’s cars are not accustomed to assessing the situation without working traffic lights and people crossing the streets as they please.

This led the company to suspend its operations, with Waymo’s app displaying a notification for some of its users, informing them that its service is suspended in the Bay Area, according to Bloomberg.

On Sunday evening, the company resumed services.

It has been reported that 130,000 customers were affected by the power outage.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) shared that the incident was caused by a fire in its substation.

While PG&E began restoring some services on Saturday evening, by Saturday morning, it had already restored services for approximately 110,000 customers. However, 21,000 people were still without power.

Waymo has provided Cybernews with additional commentary on the matter.

“We resumed ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area on Sunday. Saturday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions,” said the company’s spokesperson.

“While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events,” they added.

“Throughout the outage, we closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials. We are focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned from this event, and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day.”

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