Waymo said that it’s pausing its robotaxi services on freeways in the U.S. as it updates its software to improve performance around construction zones and flooded roads.

Before the suspension, freeway operations were available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami. The company said that street and other off-highway operations of Waymos will continue.

The company first confirmed the temporary pause to Reuters, and said that it was working to integrate recent technical learnings into software and expects to resume these routes soon.

“We are committed to being good neighbors for our riders and our communities. As part of that commitment, we make proactive decisions including temporarily pausing aspects of our service. We know riders count on us to get around, and we appreciate their patience as we work to get them where they’re going safely and reliably,” a Waymo spokesperson said in an email statement.

The company also paused operations in Atlanta, after a Waymo stopped in flood water. In early May, about 3,800 of Waymos autonomous taxis were recalled after a software defect caused some vehicles to drive into flooded roadways.

The suspension comes at a time when the Alphabet-backed company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has increased its pace of expansion into a number of new cities in the U.S. and across the globe, and getting them on freeways and local airports is important for expansion.

Competitors Tesla and Zoox have been playing catchup but don’t match the scale of Waymo yet.

The company said it has collected 170 million autonomous miles, with 13 times fewer injury-causing collisions compared with human drivers in the routes they operate in.

Waymo said it provides 500,000 trips every week, and aims to cross 1 million paid rides per week by 2026. While most Waymo models in use are Jaguar SUVs, it recently began testing a Chinese model Zeekr called Ojai in Los Angeles.

Waymo did not cite a specific instance that prompted the most recent recall, but the company has been forced to pause operations to improve software in several Southern states that have been hit by flash floods, including Texas, Tennessee and Georgia.

In 2025, Waymo recalled more than 1,200 vehicles due to a software defect resulting in minor crashes against obstacles in the road. Earlier this year, it faced renewed scrutiny after hitting a child outside a school in Santa Monica and running over a cat in San Francisco.

The layoffs bludgeoning the tech industry continued this week as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry.

Mountain View-based Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, on Wednesday said it was laying off 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, as part of its restructuring to cut costs and invest in artificial intelligence.

The company said it had slowed down due to “too many organizational layers” and the cuts will simplify the organization to become a “faster, leaner, more focused company.” Intuit said it will close its offices in Reno and Woodland Hills and incur an estimated $300 million to $340 million in restructuring charges.

“We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers’ success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure,” Sasan Goodarzi, chief executive of Intuit, said in a memo shared with employees.

Intuit announced the layoffs on the same day it reported its third-quarter results, in which revenue jumped 10% from a year earlier, to $8.56 billion.

Intuit adds to the count of more than 114,000 tech-sector employees laid off this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Meta laid off 8,000 workers on Wednesday, as the company cuts costs to ramp up investment in AI agents and infrastructure. The ever-expanding list of tech companies that have cut jobs includes Coinbase, Amazon, LinkedIn and more. Some have cited productivity gains enabling fewer workers to accomplish more with AI, while others pointed out restructuring and cost-cutting to prepare for the AI disruption.

In an earnings call, Intuit‘s chief financial officer, Sandeep Aujla, said the cuts were intended to make the organization leaner, and weren’t tied directly to Intuit’s AI use.

“AI is an important part of how we’re evolving as a company, but these decisions were not driven by AI replacing employees,” an Intuit spokesperson reiterated in an email .

Best known for its TurboTax platform, Intuit has branched into accounting with QuickBooks, credit scoring through Credit Karma and email automation via Mailchimp. Facing increased competition for AI-driven tax solutions, the company is integrating AI across its entire portfolio.

“Our AI agents are delivering value at scale, with our accounting AI agents powering recommendations across more than 50 million transactions each week, and business tax AI agents identifying millions of dollars in deductions,” Goodarzi said in the earnings call.

The restructuring will reduce overlapping roles in TurboTax and Credit Karma as the company integrates both into a single team.

A deep sense of anxiety has settled in the tech job market, propelled by consecutive layoffs and coding tasks being automated by AI.

Tech leaders have portrayed the role of human software engineers as a human in the loop, overseeing and verifying AI agents that do the work of coders.

By 2027, software developers are expected to see a 3% job contraction due to AI coding capabilities, according to Labor Automation Forecasting Hub by Metaculus, a popular website where forecasters predict how AI will reshape the workforce.