Waymo's robotaxis are becoming a common sight in San Francisco, but a recent power outage exposed significant flaws in their operation. During the outage, these autonomous vehicles struggled to navigate intersections with dark traffic signals, leading to a backlog of requests for human confirmation checks. Waymo's system is designed to treat such situations as four-way stops, but the surge in requests overwhelmed the remote human operators responsible for ensuring safety. While the company handled over 7,000 dark signals successfully on the Saturday before the outage, the sudden spike in workload contributed to congestion on already-stressed streets. Waymo’s blog post addresses this incident, emphasizing their commitment to safety. The confirmation checks were implemented to enhance safety during early deployments, but the increased scale of operations has resulted in these checks becoming a bottleneck. The company plans to refine its protocols to provide more context about power outages, allowing the robotaxis to react more decisively. This situation illustrates a broader concept of saturation, where systems fail to cope with high loads, leading to unexpected complications. The incident highlights the delicate balance between safety measures and operational efficiency, particularly in complex, real-world environments.