A dozen cars sat idling at an intersection as a Waymo-branded vehicle refused to creep forward. Around it, human drivers hesitated, honked, then squeezed past. Outside the frame, bakery owners counted ruined dough and a church lit only by candlelight kept its Sunday mass going without power.
What happened was plain and immediate: a fire at PG&E’s Mission substation on Saturday triggered a massive blackout across San Francisco, leaving well over 100,000 customers in the dark at the outage’s peak. Traffic lights failed, Muni service was disrupted, and businesses that depend on refrigeration — from corner produce stalls to busy restaurants — threw out perishable inventory just days before the holidays.
The robotaxis stalled
Autonomous vehicles added a new layer of spectacle. Videos that spread on social platforms showed Waymo robotaxis stalled at intersections and, in some cases, creating short-term gridlock as human drivers wove around them. Waymo temporarily suspended its San Francisco service Saturday evening; the company said it resumed operations late Sunday after pausing trips while engineers assessed the situation.
Waymo told San Franciscans that its systems are designed to treat malfunctioning traffic signals as four-way stops, but the blackout’s scale left some vehicles stationary longer than usual as they tried to parse intersections and traffic flow. A leaked letter earlier this month noted Waymo is providing roughly 450,000 robotaxi rides per week — a reminder that these vehicles are no longer niche experiments but a visible part of city streets.
Neighborhoods and businesses: the human toll
On the ground, the effects were less technical and more immediate. In the Richmond District and Inner Sunset, restaurants canceled packed holiday reservations. A produce market owner described tossing whole pallets of meat and fish. Ice cream shops melted through entire inventories. Some businesses tried to salvage what they could by selling on a cash-only basis or giving food away; others simply closed.
At Star of the Sea Church, parishioners held a candlelit mass because there was no electricity. City officials opened a community resource center for residents to charge devices and get water and ice, and Mayor Daniel Lurie urged people to stay off the roads unless absolutely necessary as crews worked to restore service.
PG&E said crews were working to restore power and that investigators did not suspect sabotage. The utility also reminded customers that there are claims processes for lost products or revenue, though businesses will need documentation to support any claim.
A substation with a history
This outage didn’t occur in a vacuum. The Mission substation has a documented track record: two decades ago, fires there prompted state regulators to sanction PG&E and order millions of dollars in upgrades. A 2003 blaze at the same facility led to penalties and a directive to spend on substation improvements; regulators at the time said recommendations from earlier incidents weren’t fully implemented. That history has resurfaced in conversations about whether the utility did enough to prevent a recurrence.
Local leaders signaled they’ll seek answers from PG&E, and the incident is likely to draw regulatory and civic scrutiny — especially given the timing during a busy holiday weekend.
Why this matters beyond a single outage
Cities are more than wires and poles; they are systems of interlocking technology and habit. When the electric grid falters, transit signal timing, public transit, restaurants, and even autonomous systems all feel the ripple. The way Waymo’s vehicles reacted underlines a new reality: autonomous systems depend on public infrastructure behaving predictably. When it doesn't, designers and regulators must figure out how much autonomy — and how much human fallback — is appropriate.
The episode raises questions about how we design for degraded conditions: do self-driving software and mapping services need better heuristics for citywide failures? Can operators coordinate in real time with cities when traffic control systems go dark? These questions intersect with broader debates about AI reliability and public trust in automated systems — debates covered in recent discussions about AI’s capabilities and limits as experts weigh in on human‑level intelligence.
There’s also a practical angle: navigation, traffic prediction and vehicle behavior increasingly rely on richer, faster map and AI stacks. Improved resilience in those systems — and clearer protocols for interacting with failed infrastructure — will be part of the next design cycle for fleets and city agencies alike. For readers interested in the tech that underpins modern navigation, developments like conversational AI copilots for mapping foreshadow how vehicles and apps might provide better on-the-ground guidance during outages like new navigation copilots.
The immediate aftermath
By Sunday many customers had power restored, though thousands remained without service into the next day in pockets across the west side. PG&E crews worked with temporary generators while inspections continued. City officials and the utility will both face pressure to explain what went wrong and what will be done to reduce the odds of a repeat — especially at a substation with prior incidents.
For business owners who lost costly holiday inventory and residents who sat through a quiet, unnerving night without lights, explanations and regulatory fixes will matter, but so will restitution. PG&E says customers can file claims with documentation. For the autonomous-vehicle industry, the lesson is operational as well as reputational: grid failures are messy, visible, and a stress test for systems that are increasingly woven into urban life.
The blackout was, in short, both ordinary and oddly modern: a decades-old substation problem that cascaded into contemporary questions about automation, resilience and how cities cope when essential systems fail at once.