Want to send thoughts or suggestions to\u00a0Fortune Tech?\u00a0Drop a line\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n What happened when Waymo robotaxis met a San Francisco blackout Tayfun Coskun\/Anadolu\/Getty Images<\/p>\n An extraordinary experiment happened over the weekend in San Francisco.<\/p>\n What would a fleet of autonomous vehicles do when a widespread power outage knocked out traffic lights across one-third of the city?\u00a0<\/p>\n We quickly found out\u2014and the results were plastered all over social media.\u00a0<\/p>\n On Saturday afternoon, Waymo vehicles throughout SF opted to stop where they were<\/a> or pull over and throw on their hazard lights\u2014\u201cblocking intersections\u201d and \u201ccompounding gridlock,\u201d observed the San Francisco Standard<\/a>\u2014leading the Alphabet-owned robotaxi operator to suspend service throughout the city. (It resumed Sunday evening.)<\/p>\n In a statement, Waymo said that its vehicles are \u201cdesigned to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops\u201d but \u201cthe sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As locals worked through the outage, a moderate debate about the robotaxi fleet continued online. Was it so wrong to expect Waymo\u2019s vehicles to play it safe when infrastructure stopped working? After all, aren\u2019t human drivers predictably chaotic when things go sideways? What exactly should robotaxis optimize for: traffic flow or citizen safety?\u00a0<\/p>\n And: Just how safe is stopping if you prompt traffic to go around you?<\/p>\n Waymo resumed service Sunday evening, no doubt grappling with these questions (and what city officials might have to say about them). \u201cWe are already learning and improving from this event,\u201d it said. \u2014AN<\/p>\n More tech<\/p>\n \u2014Pirates scrape Spotify<\/a>. Activists Anna’s Archive release hundreds of terabytes of music and metadata via torrent files.<\/p>\n \u2014Shield AI: Sitting at a global inflection point<\/a> for fully autonomous warfighting.<\/p>\n \u2014SoftBank cashes out to back OpenAI<\/a>. The Japanese conglomerate is looking under every rock to fulfill its \u201call in\u201d OpenAI funding promise.<\/p>\n \u2014Chaos at CISA<\/a>. A failed, unsanctioned polygraph by its acting director has the U.S. cybersecurity agency in disarray.<\/p>\n \u2014PE firms acquire Clearwater Analytics for $8.4 billion<\/a>. Permira and Warburg Pincus lead the investor group seeking to buy the fintech firm.<\/p>\n \u2014Uber goes to London.<\/a> A robotaxi trial in partnership with Baidu will begin in the first half of next year.<\/p>\n \u2014Data center deals reach $61 billion worldwide in 2025<\/a>, according to S&P Global.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/GettyImages-2252297359_2d67cf.jpg\"\/)
<\/a>A Waymo robotaxi unable to detect traffic lights after a major power outage in San Francisco, California on December 20, 2025.<\/p>\n