Collapse in the Real World: Baidu Robotaxi Outage Paralyzes Wuhan Traffic

The price of a software bug in Embodied AI is blocked intersections. On April 1, a massive infrastructure failure of Apollo Go by Chinese giant Baidu occurred in Wuhan. Over 100 driverless robotaxis simultaneously bricked themselves right in the flow of moving traffic.

Passengers were trapped in cars unable to continue their route or safely park on the curb. While the recent DeepSeek API failure only caused delays in IT pipelines, the Baidu incident clearly demonstrates the physical risks of autonomous systems. This is a strong argument in favor of the approach presented last week by Microsoft and Orderfox: maintaining a "red button" and a human-in-the-loop approval module when executing critical actions in the real world.

Source: AP / The Verge