It sounds like human remote drivers are still off the table.
A postmortem from Waymo on Tuesday is offering at least some clarity about what the hell happened to its poor, benighted San Francisco operation after much of the power across the city went out on Saturday.
Waymo behavior at dark stoplights forced the Alphabet-owned company to call all its San Francisco robotaxis back home, a logistical catastrophe. But in fairness, social media posts probably made Waymo’s ad-hoc solution look even more haphazard than it actually was, giving the impression that all the Waymos in San Francisco had been zapped at the same time by whatever caused the outage, causing them to halt in place, including in busy intersections, as if their robot drivers had been raptured to robo-heaven.
Power outage took out the waymos RIP pic.twitter.com/DPte8oOGku— Vincent Woo (@fulligin) December 21, 2025
There were certainly choked streets and blocked intersections, but below is how Waymo prefers to frame the way the problem arose. Note that in its comms, Waymo refers to the self-driving software in its cars as “the Waymo Driver.”
“While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.”
It seems very important to Waymo’s brand to not ever allow the impression that Waymos are ever remotely driven. What Waymo has instead of “remote drivers” or “teleoperators” is called “fleet response,” a Waymo blog post says.
