A Waymo San Francisco power outage on Saturday, 18 July 2026 prompted the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company to pause service across the Bay Area for approximately an hour while it assessed conditions and coordinated with local officials. Service has since resumed, though some adjustments in affected areas remained in place into the afternoon.
The outage began when NBC Bay Area reports that PG&E crews conducting a routine procedure between two substations at around 9:45 a.m. inadvertently triggered a protective device on the system. Power was lost across the Presidio, Golden Gate Park, and the Richmond District from approximately 9:52 a.m.
The actual number of customers affected is a touch murkier than first reported. The snippet cited around 7,000 PG&E customers losing power, but the NY Post reports PG&E put the real figure at approximately 9,400 customers. A separate system glitch sent erroneous outage alerts to roughly 120,000 additional customers who had never lost power at all; a PG&E spokesman later clarified that those ‘120,000 customers were never out of power.’ NBC Bay Area reports that power was restored to all but approximately 2,500 customers by 12:10 p.m., with full restoration completed by 4:02 p.m.
Waymo’s San Francisco Power Outage Response: Bay Area Service Paused, Not Just the City
Here is the part the initial wire reports underplayed: Waymo did not simply pause rides in San Francisco. According to the BBC, the company initially paused all service across the Bay Area while it gauged the scale of the problem.
A Waymo spokesperson told the BBC: ‘While the Waymo Driver is designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops, the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections.’ In other words, the cars were technically doing what they were supposed to do; they were just doing it very, very slowly.
Waymo’s first public-facing message to San Francisco riders, shared via a screenshot on social media, said service was ‘temporarily paused’ and that ‘freeway routes are unavailable.’ A company spokesperson later told press: ‘We are making temporary adjustments to our service while we monitor local conditions. We know riders depend on us, and we will return to normal operations as soon as possible.’ After service resumed, a second spokesperson statement confirmed the company had ‘decided to pause service for approx. one hour to assess the scale of the power outage affecting a large portion of San Francisco and coordinate with local officials.’
Lessons from December and the Fourth of July
Waymo framed the pause as a deliberate, lessons-learned response rather than a reactive scramble. The SF Standard reports the company stayed in contact with San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management throughout the outage, citing its two prior incidents as the basis for the more cautious approach.
Those prior incidents are worth recalling. In December, a blackout caused a number of Waymo vehicles to stall on city streets. Then, on the Fourth of July, Waymo cars became stranded as crowds and street closures overwhelmed the company’s routing system during Golden Gate Bridge fireworks. The BBC reports that during that July 4 incident, Mayor Daniel Lurie deployed police officers, fire crews, and others to help manage the resulting traffic chaos.
The SF Standard notes that Waymo reported no problems during Saturday’s pause, describing it as a chance to assess conditions before resuming rides. Whether that framing reflects genuine operational discipline or a well-crafted PR line is, perhaps, a question for a quieter news day.
Traffic signals across parts of the Richmond District and the Presidio went dark during the outage, creating exactly the kind of ambiguous intersection conditions the Waymo Driver’s four-way-stop protocol is designed to handle. The protocol works; the question is whether it scales gracefully when half a district goes dark simultaneously.
Mayor Lurie has been direct about where he stands. He has called for tougher state regulations to ‘adequately address how autonomous vehicles operate during major incidents, planned or not.’ The July 18 outage gives him fresh material: a company that, by its own account, needed an hour and a call to the Department of Emergency Management to decide it was safe to drive through an area with non-functional traffic lights.
Waymo’s next test may be simpler than a blackout. San Francisco is a city; the power will go out again. The question regulators and riders are now asking is whether the response playbook is written down somewhere, or whether it gets drafted anew each time the lights go out.
