San Francisco Power Outage Sparks Confusion After System Wrongly Warns of Mass Blackout

A power outage hit about 9,400 PG&E customers in San Francisco Saturday morning, but a system glitch mistakenly alerted roughly 120,000 customers that they had lost power. The outage also forced Waymo to pause its robotaxi service after traffic signals went dark.

A power outage hit San Francisco on Saturday morning, but the real story became a glitch that made things look far worse than they actually were. Around 9:45 a.m., a routine operation at two San Francisco substations set off a protective device on the electrical system, triggering the blackout. PG&E confirmed that the Richmond and Golden Gate Park neighborhoods were the first areas affected.

Shortly after the outage began, PG&E’s own notification system sent out an alert claiming that around 120,000 San Francisco customers had lost power. In reality, the actual number of customers affected was nowhere close to that.

PG&E spokesman Edgar Hopida addressed the confusion directly, stating plainly that those 120,000 customers were never actually without power.

The company explained that because the outage involved two separate electrical circuits, the notification system mistakenly grouped the situation under a larger protective device, which inflated the outage count far beyond reality. Crews caught the mistake fairly quickly, correcting the customer count to the true figure of about 9,400 within roughly 30 minutes.

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PG&E initially estimated power would be restored by 12:30 p.m., but later pushed that timeline back to 2:30 p.m. The company said it plans to investigate what caused the outage in the first place.

In a statement, PG&E reaffirmed its commitment to public safety, saying the wellbeing of its customers and communities remains its top priority.