Waymo Pushes Fleet-Wide Software Upgrade After San Francisco Blackout Exposes Robotaxi Bottleneck

New updates have been reported about Waymo.

Waymo is rolling out a fleet-wide software update after a power outage in San Francisco exposed a critical operational bottleneck in its robotaxi service: handling disabled traffic signals at scale. The company disclosed that, although its autonomous driving system is designed to treat dark traffic lights as four-way stops, many vehicles sought remote “confirmation checks” from Waymo’s fleet response team during Saturday’s blackout. The resulting surge in human-assisted validations overwhelmed the support system, causing traffic congestion and widely shared videos of stalled robotaxis—an incident that underscores the operational and reputational risks in scaling commercial autonomous fleets in dense urban markets. Waymo said this confirmation mechanism was intentionally conservative and appropriate for early-stage deployment, but acknowledged it no longer fits the demands of its current operating scale.

In response, Waymo is updating its software to give the self-driving system more detailed contextual awareness of regional power outages, enabling vehicles to proceed through dark signals more decisively without routine human confirmation. The company is also revising its emergency response protocols to incorporate lessons from the blackout, aiming to reduce dependence on remote human intervention when large-scale infrastructure failures occur. Despite the high-profile failures, Waymo emphasized that its vehicles successfully passed more than 7,000 disabled signals during the outage, framing the event as a stress test of its technology and operational model. The incident adds to a series of software refinements, including prior updates to improve behavior around stopped school buses that triggered an NHTSA investigation and recall, highlighting that Waymo is still uncovering edge cases as it matures its platform. For executives and investors, the episode is a reminder that the path to scaled, profitable robotaxi operations hinges not only on core driving performance, but also on robust exception handling, fleet management systems, and regulatory trust as the company seeks to expand its autonomous services in major markets.