According to AIbase, a large-scale power outage suddenly occurred in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, December 20, 2025, causing the fully autonomous ride-hailing service of Waymo, an autonomous driving leader under Alphabet, to be completely suspended in the San Francisco Bay Area. The incident was caused by a fire at a PG&E substation at the intersection of 8th Street and Mission Street, resulting in about 130,000 users across the city losing power and numerous traffic lights going out.
Due to the inability to recognize the paralyzed traffic infrastructure, hundreds of Waymo autonomous vehicles were immobilized or "stranded" throughout the city, with some vehicles directly stopped in the middle of streets such as Tech Boulevard, causing serious traffic congestion. A Waymo spokesperson stated that in order to ensure passenger safety and cooperate with municipal recovery efforts, the company had to take temporary shutdown measures. Although Waymo is working hard to resume services, this incident exposed the vulnerability of fully autonomous technology in dealing with urban infrastructure collapse. Brian Littman, a transportation research expert at MIT, pointed out that this event proved that current autonomous driving systems still lack reliable human backup mechanisms.
