Waymo preemptively paused service during SF power outage 21%
By Jennifer Wadsworth13%
7/18/2026, 9:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Unattributed Quote, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Framing Effect, with Self-Serving Bias as the most egregious example at 20.5% saturation with 112 hits. Analysis detected 913 faulty-reasoning hits from 547 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.2% and a BS Rank of 21% (14,321 of 17,923 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 79.90% of the article peer group.
A power outage knocked out traffic signals across parts of San Francisco‘s Richmond District and Presidio on Saturday morning.
This time, Waymo got out of the way before things went sideways.
The company said it paused service in the area for about an hour starting shortly after the outage began, a precaution it says was informed by two earlier incidents — a December blackout and a Fourth of July fireworks celebration — that left dozens of its driverless vehicles stuck in the street.
A Waymo spokesperson said there were no reported problems on Saturday, describing the pause as a chance to assess conditions on the ground before resuming rides.
San Francisco Fire Department spokesperson Lt.
Mariano Elias confirmed there were no known issues.
The Waymo spokesperson said the company stayed in contact with San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management throughout the outage, and that some service adjustments in the affected area remained in place as of Saturday afternoon.
The outage began around 9:45 a.m., according to PG&E spokesperson Edgar Hopida, and initially affected about 9,400 customers in the Richmond and Golden Gate Park neighborhoods.
The outage occurred during routine switching work between the N and K substations, done to let crews perform maintenance without de-energizing larger sections of the grid, Hopida added in a late afternoon update.
PG&E said it will investigate further to determine what went wrong.
An automated alert briefly and incorrectly told 120,000 customers they’d lost power — the result, Hopida said, of a notification system rolling the outage up to a larger protective device.
The false alert stemmed from a data-transmission issue between SmartMeter and PG&E’s Outage Management System, Hopida said, which “communicated a much larger outage than was reality.”
Power was restored to all but 2,500 customers by 12:10 p.m., Hopida said, and all customers were fully restored as of 4 p.m.
Saturday‘s response marked a sharp departure from Waymo’s handling of previous disruptions.
During a citywide December blackout that knocked out traffic signals across roughly a third of San Francisco, Waymo vehicles stalled more than 1,500 times.
The company dispatched tow trucks to retrieve 64 cars while emergency responders worked to clear blocked intersections.
At a Board of Supervisors hearing in March, Waymo apologized for its response but acknowledged it still expects first responders to help move malfunctioning vehicles.
During the city’s Fourth of July fireworks celebration, Waymo vehicles again became stranded as crowds and street closures overwhelmed the company’s routing system, prompting Mayor Daniel Lurie this week to urge California transportation officials to adopt stricter emergency standards for autonomous vehicles.
Lurie’s letter argued that California’s current regulatory framework doesn’t adequately address how AVs perform “during major incidents, planned or not,” and proposed four standards AV companies should have to meet, including the ability to quickly move vehicles out of active lanes and share real-time data with the city during emergencies.
Whether Saturday‘s response reflects a permanent change remains unclear.
The California Public Utilities Commission requires Waymo to report vehicle “stoppage events” in quarterly filings, but the company has fought to keep some of that information confidential.
At a January hearing, Waymo declined to confirm how many vehicles became stranded during December’s blackout, arguing that even the raw number constituted a trade secret.
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