At dusk, 50 people gathered on San Francisco’s longest dead-end street, a mischievous plan in motion. Their goal? To orchestrate the world’s first “Waymo DDoS” by simultaneously ordering 50 Waymo autonomous taxis, overwhelming the system in a playful stress test. As the sun dipped below the horizon, smartphones lit up, and requests flooded Waymo’s network. The quiet street buzzed with anticipation as self-driving cars began arriving, only to face the dead-end’s logistical trap. Confusion ensued—vehicles queued, unable to turn around efficiently, creating a robotic traffic jam. Onlookers chuckled as Waymo’s algorithms struggled to process the sudden surge. This wasn’t malice but a cheeky experiment exposing the limits of autonomous systems in edge cases. The stunt highlighted vulnerabilities in urban robo-taxi infrastructure, sparking debates on scalability and resilience. By nightfall, the street cleared, but the “Waymo DDoS” had made its mark, a quirky footnote in tech history.
Lesson: Self-driving is getting WAYMO interesting!