Waymo says the San Francisco power outage overwhelmed its robotaxis at scale, creating a backlog that led to response delays.

A substation fire knocked out traffic lights across the city, leaving autonomous cars frozen at intersections and clogging streets. When a major power outage left tens of thousands of San Francisco residents in the dark this weekend,

Waymo’s robotaxis suffered a serious failure on Saturday when a power outage affecting a large part of San Francisco caused problems for its autonomous cars in the city. Some 130,000 residents lost power to their homes and businesses,

Waymo is shipping a software update to help its robotaxis navigate disabled traffic lights during power outages “more decisively,” the company said Tuesday in a blog post that explains why its self-driving vehicles got stuck at intersections during a blackout in San Francisco this past weekend.

Tech company Waymo is making changes after its self-driving taxis blocked intersections and snarled traffic during the San Francisco power outage on Saturday. The company says it’s updating its software so the robotaxis can “navigate more decisively” in a power failure.

After widespread power outages in San Francisco overwhelmed Waymo’s remote assistance system, the company is rolling out a software update to help its driverless cars better manage large-scale blackouts.

A major power outage in San Francisco turned Waymo’s driverless fleet into rolling roadblocks, as the company’s autonomous cars encountered dark intersections, stopped, and then mostly refused to move.

Waymo's fleet of Jaguar I-Pace-based robotaxis experienced a widespread shutdown during a recent major power outage in San Francisco, leaving multiple vehicles stalled and blocking roads. The incident has raised questions about the autonomous cars' ability to handle unexpected disruptions,