San Francisco blackout strands Waymo robotaxis, halts driverless service

A PG&E substation fire triggered a major San Francisco blackout that left roughly 120,000–130,000 customers without power and stranded numerous Waymo robotaxis at intersections. As outages persisted, about 21,000 homes and businesses remained without power in areas including the Presidio, Richmond District, Golden Gate Park and parts of downtown. Waymo paused its fully driverless service in the Bay Area while coordinating with city officials; no collisions have been reported and the company gave no restart time. The outage disrupted traffic signals, degraded cellular networks and street lighting—conditions that Waymo’s safety systems could not safely navigate. Experts urged retaining human backup systems and clearer regulatory limits on driverless fleets. The incident drew public and regulatory scrutiny, and commentary from Elon Musk noting Tesla’s robotaxis were “unaffected,” which prompted criticism given Tesla runs supervised FSD rides in San Francisco and lacks driverless permits in California. For crypto traders, the event is a reminder that even highly automated, decentralized technologies remain vulnerable to centralized infrastructure failures: outages can cascade into operational risk for services that depend on external systems (power, cellular, mapping). Traders should factor such systemic infrastructure risk into operational and counterparty assessments for blockchain services, oracle providers and smart-contract systems that rely on real-world data feeds or centralized gateways.