I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?

The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.

"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.

In my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose power.

Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the outage is not resolved until mains power comes back

These monopolies aren’t required to have uptime in the same way the POTS network was.

We had a week long outage last year and people were driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on their data

True but the comment I replied to mentions a different case where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.

Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on the road.

Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.