Waymo says its San Francisco robotaxi operations have resumed after the company briefly paused service while it assessed a power outage affecting a large part of the city. The interruption lasted about one hour, according to the company.
Before service was restored, riders in San Francisco were told that trips were temporarily paused and that freeway routes were not available. Waymo said it was making temporary changes to monitor local conditions and would return to normal operations as soon as it could.
The Alphabet-owned company later said it chose to stop service for roughly an hour in order to gauge the scale of the outage and coordinate with local officials. The outage appeared to affect around 7,000 PG&E customers in San Francisco. Waymo has faced similar disruptions before, including incidents involving stalled vehicles during a blackout and another traffic slowdown tied to fireworks near the Golden Gate Bridge. Those episodes have helped fuel calls from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie for stricter state rules covering autonomous vehicles during major incidents.
Source: techcrunch.com
