Amid Saturday’s PG&E outage, social media was flooded with posts showing dozens of confused Waymos pausing at intersections as they fruitlessly attempted to contact central command, causing frazzled humans to navigate around them, which led to a temporary halt in service.

As Mission Local reports, Waymo temporarily halted service around 7 pm Saturday as reports swarmed the internet documenting the fleet’s autonomous vehicles creating traffic jams throughout the city during a major power outage that resulted in several rolling blackouts, per SFGate.

Per Mission Local, the Waymo vehicles appeared to stop in their tracks, as cars piled up behind them — at traffic lights that had gone dark as well as at four-way stops, as users noted in the Waymo subreddit.

“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services given the broad power outage in San Francisco,” Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion wrote. “We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work.”

Commenters in the Waymo subreddit thread had a variety of observations from the meltdown, including seeing many near-misses with human drivers.

“The Waymo’s weren’t running through controlled intersections at full speed because they didn’t know there were traffic lights. Saw a bunch of close calls with human drivers,” wrote dwkeith.

“They’re running through intersections constantly right now. Or bricking in the middle. Either way hope nothing bad happens!” added karstcity.

When a skeptic scoffed at the estimate of idling vehicles as being in the hundreds, Mental-Reach-231 verified it was accurate, adding that Waymo significantly increased the severity of the traffic standstill.

“As someone who had to drive through the p-p show this evening, and the dozens of halted Waymos, with multiple intersections with multiple Waymos, I would suggest it’s not a far exaggerated number,” they explained. “And the suspension of service wasn't because of the traffic nightmare, it was because they couldn't provide vehicles because they were all stuck making a traffic nightmare exponentially worse.”

Potat0man69 said they observed plenty of Waymo vehicles navigate intersections adequately, but the chaos of the situation scrambled the whole system and threw the cars into a sort of panic mode when they couldn’t connect with Waymo’s remote assistance.

“There were many Waymo’s I saw able to figure out the lack of a light perfectly fine,” they wrote. “I think it’s just that these intersections were so chaotic that eventually the Waymo “brain” throws up its hands and asks for remote assistance (people taking the intersection out of order, Waymo getting cut off, people walking where they shouldn’t be, etc. essentially overwhelming the normal decision making process, making the car think it’s in an unfamiliar situation).”

“Smart concept to have it reach a point where there’s so much going on that it decides it could probably use a bit of help, bad execution to have it rely on something that could also be impacted by the same root cause,” potat0man69 concluded.

Per SFGate, PG&E has pinpointed a substation at 8th Street and Mission streets as the source of the outage, which has a history of problems, per NBC Bay Area. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie confirmed on social media that some customers will likely continue to experience outages “into the early morning hours.”

Image: AnnTrades/X

Previously: Massive Power Outage In San Francisco Leaves 200,000+ In the Dark, Disrupts Muni and BART

Confused Waymo Cars Block 101 On-Ramp In Potrero Hill, Then Go Down Closed Road