A large slice of San Francisco briefly went dim Saturday night, but most lights were back on by early Sunday. At the peak, about 124,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers—nearly a third of the city—lost electricity as darkness fell, according to PowerOutage.com. By around 1:30am Sunday, that number had dropped to roughly 24,000 of the city's 414,000 customers, with PG&E saying crews worked through the night to restore service, the New York Times reports. The outage confused self-driving cars, per the San Francisco Chronicle, which became confused by the lack of traffic lights and caused traffic jams when they stopped in intersections. Waymo then suspended service.
The outage swept across much of the city's northern and western neighborhoods, from the Richmond and Sunset districts through Haight-Ashbury and into downtown. City Hall's dome went dark, some restaurants resorted to candlelit service, and pedestrians used phone flashlights to cross streets. The disruption shuttered stores, stalled electronic payments, and closed key Bay Area Rapid Transit stations downtown, while San Francisco's Muni light-rail system scaled back service after its train-control computers lost power. The San Francisco Ballet's performance of the Nutcracker was called off. Officials have not yet pinned down a single cause of the outage, per the Times. A substation fire contributed to the problem, officials said.
Residents and businesses improvised. Some gas stations couldn't pump fuel, while bars and restaurants that stayed open took cash only. At one neighborhood bar, staff borrowed battery-powered lamps and candles from neighbors. When lights started coming back on shortly after 9pm, some people watching the city's silhouette from Alamo Square said they were almost sorry to see the brief, low-tech evening come to an end. "I wanted to do a puzzle by candlelight," one said.
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