Hackers Jam San Francisco Street with 50 Self-Driving Cabs

Autonomous vehicles may be the future of rideshare, but they may not quite be ready for widespread use yet.

An inventive act organized by a tech-savvy social media user highlighted a potential exploit in one self-driving car company’s system.

The so-called ‘world’s first Waymo DDoS” was apparently organized by 23-year-old self-proclaimed tech prankster and San Francisco resident Riley Walz, who posted “the plan” to his X account on October 12.

However, the actual incident occurred in July, according to Road & Track.

“At dusk, 50 people went to San Francisco’s longest dead-end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time,” read Walz’s post. Attached were pictures showing the autonomous vehicles lined up with seemingly nowhere to go.

The plan resulted in the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles which Waymo uses being caught in the synthesized self-driving traffic jam.

Likewise, this is why Walz called the move a “Waymo DDoS,” which stands for dedicated denial of service. It’s a type of cyberattack that overwhelms a system with traffic to disrupt its normal operation, whether that system is a website, app, or other online platform.

Walz’s use of the term references how these dozens of simultaneous requests briefly jammed Waymo’s network.

However, Waymo eventually caught on and was able to fix the issue, as highlighted in a second post to X by Walz.

“We didn’t actually get in the cars. They left after about 10 min and charged a $5 no show fee. Waymo handled this well. I assume this isn’t much different than if a big concert had just ended. Eventually, they disabled all rides within a 2 block vicinity until the morning,” he said.

Walz explained that the reason he and his coconspirators decided to do this was simply because they thought it would be fun to see, while also stressing his respect for the Waymo team and what they’ve built.

Walz also emphasized that, as a result of the so-called DDoS attack, the company can now adjust their systems to prevent a similar event with malicious intent behind it from happening.

He also emphasized that the event was organized deliberately and with care so as not to disrupt other people.

Waymo provided a statement to Road & Track which emphasized that it is always refining its system to balance the service’s physical footprint with the need to deliver an excellent rider experience.

Considering how crucial large-scale events and the demand they create for Waymo vehicles are, Walz’s prank was likely a welcome test of the service more than anything in the company’s eyes.

This isn’t the first time one of Walz’s tech experiments has made headlines, having done so in September for a smartphone app he made which tracked San Francisco parking control officers.

The app and website functioned by scraping publicly accessible parking citation data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, then interpreted and displayed it in an accessible manner.

On the same day Walz’s platform went live, the City of San Francisco figured out how he was getting the data and made changes to prevent this, ending the experiment as quickly as it had begun.

The attack is reminiscent of the 2023 Netflix dystopian movie Leave the World Behind, where an army of self-driving Teslas causes havoc on the road by crashing into each other, preventing a family (including Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) from escaping the Hamptons.

Waymo Worries

Recent months have brought more serious issues to light for Waymo, highlighted by California’s difficulties with ticketing AVs that break road rules and a new law coming to rectify this issue.

A Waymo in Atlanta was also seen passing a school bus which had its stop signs extended as children got off. Typically punished by a $1,000 fine with jail time under Georgia state law, the self-driving car got off scot free with no one to hold accountable.

Even Waymo’s partnership with Uber is under attack thanks to Lyft shedding its human-only identity to announce the launch of self-driving shuttles in 2026.