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Waymo suspended its robotaxi service on all U.S. freeways and paused operations in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday as the Alphabet $GOOGL -0.32% unit works to update software related to construction zone performance and flooded road detection.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami had all been served by Waymo's freeway routes, the company told Reuters. Street-level operations in those cities remain unaffected. Waymo also confirmed it paused service in Dallas and Houston out of caution ahead of forecasted severe weather across Texas, according to TechCrunch.
"We have temporarily paused freeway operations, as we work to integrate recent technical learnings into our software and expect to resume these routes soon," a Waymo spokesperson said in an email.
The Atlanta pause, which affects service offered through Waymo's partnership with Uber $UBER -1.33%, followed an incident on Wednesday in which an unoccupied Waymo vehicle entered a flooded road during heavy rain and stopped for roughly an hour before being recovered, the company said. According to TechCrunch, Waymo said the Atlanta storm dumped rain fast enough that roads were flooding before the National Weather Service had put out any flash flood warning, watch, or advisory — thresholds that feed into the broader pool of signals the company uses when readying its fleet for hazardous conditions.
