Baidu Apollo (萝卜快跑) — Wuhan, China
Location
Wuhan, China — elevated highway / bridge
杨泗港大桥 (Yangsiggang Bridge), 白沙洲大桥 (Baishazhou Bridge), 三环线 (Third Ring Road)
Description
Approximately 100 萝卜快跑 (Luobo Kuaipao) robotaxis simultaneously shut down across Wuhan during evening rush hour. Vehicles stopped on elevated highways and major bridges including 杨泗港大桥, 白沙洲大桥, and 三环线 elevated sections. Passengers were trapped inside vehicles for up to 2 hours. The in-vehicle SOS system was non-functional. Customer service lines were completely overloaded and unreachable. Police had to rescue vehicles and extract passengers one by one. The mass shutdown paralyzed major traffic arteries in Wuhan during peak hours. This incident represents the largest single robotaxi fleet failure event globally, surpassing the Waymo SF blackout (ROAM-2025-003) in both scale and severity due to passengers being physically trapped on elevated structures with no functioning emergency systems.
Impact
Vehicles
100
Duration
120 min
Injuries
0
Fatalities
0
Traffic disruption: critical
Emergency Response
Resolution: police physically accessed each vehicle to release passengers and clear vehicles from bridges and elevated roads one by one
Root Cause
cloud/network system failure
Mass simultaneous shutdown suggests cloud platform or network connectivity failure affecting the entire fleet; all remote systems including SOS, customer service, and remote intervention failed simultaneously, indicating a common-mode failure in the backend infrastructure
⚠️ Unconfirmed / Under investigation
Systemic Issues
- ~100 vehicles simultaneously failing indicates catastrophic single-point-of-failure in cloud infrastructure
- SOS system non-functional during mass failure — the moment it was most needed
- Customer service completely collapsed under load
- Passengers trapped on elevated bridges with no exit path — uniquely dangerous
- No graceful degradation: vehicles stopped in-lane on bridges rather than reaching safe harbors
- Police one-by-one rescue is not scalable — what if fleet grows 10x?
- Largest robotaxi fleet failure globally in terms of vehicles affected
- Evening rush hour on bridges maximized public impact and danger
Regulatory Action
Wuhan city government initiated emergency review of 萝卜快跑 operations. Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reportedly requested incident report from Baidu. National-level discussion on robotaxi fleet resilience standards intensified.