Wed Dec 24 08:10:00 UTC 2025: Okay, here’s a news article based on the provided Waymo statement:

Headline: Waymo Navigates San Francisco Power Outage, Pauses Service to Avoid Congestion

San Francisco, CA – Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company, faced a significant test over the weekend when a widespread PG&E power outage plunged nearly a third of San Francisco into darkness, crippling traffic signals and causing city-wide gridlock. The company paused their autonomous vehicle service due to the outage and has pledged to integrate lessons learned from the event.

According to a statement released by Waymo, the sheer number of dark traffic signals presented a unique challenge. While the Waymo Driver is designed to treat unlit signals as four-way stops, the scale of the outage resulted in a surge of confirmation requests from the vehicles, causing delays and contributing to already congested streets.

“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.”

As the situation worsened and city officials urged residents to stay home, Waymo made the decision to temporarily halt its service. The company directed its fleet to park safely and return to depots in stages, ensuring they did not impede emergency vehicles or further exacerbate the traffic crisis.

“We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves. This ensured we did not further add to the congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort,” the statement read.

Waymo emphasized its commitment to improving its technology and response protocols based on the experience. Immediate steps include:

  • Integrating more information about outages: Rolling out fleet-wide updates that provide vehicles with specific context about regional outages, enabling them to navigate affected intersections more decisively.
  • Updating emergency preparedness and response: Improving emergency response protocols and collaborating with San Francisco city officials on preparedness plans.
  • Expanding first responder engagement: Continuing to update training for first responders on interacting with Waymo vehicles.

The company reiterated its commitment to San Francisco, praising the city’s first responders and Mayor Lurie for their leadership. Waymo currently states that they have trained more than 25,000 first responders in the US and around the world on how to interact with Waymo. With over 100 million miles of autonomous driving experience, Waymo aims to continue improving its technology and serving the San Francisco community.

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