{"id":75571,"date":"2025-12-24T05:31:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T08:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/lessons-from-the-pge-outage\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T05:31:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T08:31:13","slug":"lessons-from-the-pge-outage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/en\/lessons-from-the-pge-outage\/","title":{"rendered":"lessons from the PG&E outage"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

At Waymo, our mission is to be the world\u2019s most trusted driver. We know trust is built through consistent behavior over time\u2014earned through every mile we drive and every interaction we have with the community. This past Saturday, as a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, our service was put to the test. With power now restored, we want to share an account of our operations during the outage and how we are evolving to better serve the city.<\/p>\n

The scale of the outage and the sheer number of disabled traffic lights were the primary contributors to city-wide gridlock. As signals went dark across major corridors, the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections. The situation was severe enough that the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management advised residents to stay home, underscoring the extraordinary nature of the weekend\u2019s disruptions.<\/p>\n

Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology. While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice. While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.<\/p>\n

We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.<\/p>\n

As the outage persisted and City officials urged residents to stay off the streets to prioritize first responders, we temporarily paused our service in the area. We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves. This ensured we did not further add to the congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort.<\/p>\n

The path forward<\/b><\/h4>\n

We\u2019ve always focused on developing the Waymo Driver for the world as it is, including when infrastructure fails. We are analyzing the event, and are already integrating the lessons from this weekend\u2019s PG&E outage. Here are some of the immediate steps we\u2019re taking:<\/p>\n