Here is a number worth sitting with: sixteen weeks after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the network has recorded more than 96,200 route diversions. Week 16 alone saw a 29% single week decline, the sharpest drop in the entire dataset. That is the first real sign of stabilization. The reason is that routing has finally started to catch up with the disruption.
We have been watching this build in the data for months. Navi Mumbai import dwell has climbed every single week without exception, from 5 days to 20 days, with cargo sitting longer before it can move on. Jebel Ali lost more shipments than any other port in the dataset, 15,944 in total, most of them absorbed by Khawr Fakkan. The control case tells the story clearly: Salalah absorbed a similar early surge, peaked at 36.6 days, and has since fallen to 17.5 days and is still declining.
We have seen this shape before. Not this exact event, but the pattern.
The last three years: event by event
In November 2025, we argued that supply chain volatility had shifted from an occasional disruption to chaos as a permanent operating condition. We called it the Never Normal. We had analyzed events from the prior three years, including:
Red Sea / Houthi attacks
The Red Sea crisis began in November 2023 and forced carriers to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. That added 10 to 14 days to Asia-Europe transit times and pushed Suez throughput below baseline for two straight years. Destination dwell also rose steadily, with Rotterdam reaching a 56% increase above pre-crisis levels at one point.
Panama Canal drought
A historic drought cut canal transits from 36 to 24 per day, then to 18, before capacity was restored in 2024. Volumes looked relatively stable, but dwell times rose sharply and cargo was front-loaded ahead of restrictions. The signal was in timing, not throughput.
Baltimore bridge collapse
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March 2024, Baltimore’s container flow effectively stopped. April TEUs fell 99% versus the pre-collapse baseline, and cargo was diverted to other East Coast ports.
ILA port strike
The October 2024 strike lasted only three days, but the effects lasted much longer. Shippers front-loaded cargo ahead of the walkout and again ahead of the January 2025 deadline, creating two separate waves of volume distortion.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton
Two major storms hit the Southeast U.S. within two weeks of each other in fall 2024. Port closures were temporary, but shipments still fell and the region absorbed meaningful short-term disruption.
Tariffs, cyclone clusters and trade shifts in 2025 and 2026
Liberation Day tariffs quickly rerouted trade flows. The UK-India FTA triggered front-loading ahead of implementation. Southeast Asia’s cyclone cluster disrupted inland cargo movement even when port throughput stayed flat. And the Hormuz closure in 2026 showed how fast a single chokepoint can amplify through the system.
And now we sit in the midst of another major event. But the larger point is easier to see when you step back and look at the last three years of data together. Nine distinct disruptions. Different causes. Different geographies. Different severity. In most cases, the next one arrived before the network had fully stabilized from the previous one.
This is not a sequence of isolated shocks. It is a pattern. It is the new normal.
Three things the data is telling us
1. Disruptions do not queue politely
The Red Sea crisis had already been suppressing Suez throughput for two years when the Hormuz closure began. Tariff-driven trade restructuring was still reshaping Trans-Pacific lanes when the Southeast Asia cyclone cluster hit load ports. The ILA settlement had barely cleared when Liberation Day arrived.
Not one of these events resolved cleanly before the next one started. The network has been absorbing overlapping shocks continuously across this period, and that compounding effect is something most planning models were not built to handle.
2. Volume can look fine when it is not
Panama maintained regional TEU volumes while dwell times spiked 18%. The Southeast Asia cyclones left port throughput flat while origin dwell rose 7%. The ILA pull-forward barely moved monthly container data while creating six months of inventory distortion.
Port throughput is the most visible supply chain metric, but it often masks what is actually happening to cargo. Dwell time is a more honest signal. It measures what the network is doing to your shipment, not just whether vessels are arriving.
3. Anticipated disruptions create real ones
The front-loading patterns across Panama, the ILA negotiations, the UK-India FTA, and the pre-conflict Gulf dwell creep all point to the same thing: supply chains respond to expected events, not just actual ones.
Shippers moved before restrictions hit. Volumes surged ahead of strikes. Dwell climbed before the Strait closed. If you wait for confirmation before acting, you are already behind.
In a never normal environment, the window for response opens earlier than most planning timelines assume.
Decision intelligence is how you operate in the new normal
Looking at 36 months of data across nine distinct disruptions, it’s clear that volatility has become structural rather than episodic, and even that understates the problem.
There is no planning model that accounts for a canal drought, a bridge collapse, a three-day dock strike, two back-to-back hurricanes, a multi-country cyclone cluster, sweeping tariff restructuring, a bilateral trade agreement and a Strait of Hormuz closure all landing inside the same 36-month window.
The organizations that navigated this period better were not the ones with the most accurate forecasts. They were the ones that had already moved beyond treating disruption response as a human-in-the-loop process.
The next disruption is not something to plan around. It is something to act on. The question is no longer how early you see it coming, it is whether your system can separate signal from noise across a volatile landscape, deploy agents to act on it and route the right decisions to the right people at the right time.
That is what decision intelligence means in practice: not just a dashboard that surfaces disruptions faster, but a system that knows what to do and can execute while teams are still reading the summary.
In the new normal, that is not a competitive advantage. It is the baseline.
