Suez Canal Disruption: What the Ever Given and the Houthi Campaign Have Taught Global Trade

The Suez Canal in Numbers#

The Suez Canal is a 193km waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, connecting Europe and Asia without the need to circumnavigate Africa. In 2023 — the last full year before the Houthi disruption — the Canal handled approximately 26,000 ship transits, carrying an estimated $1 trillion in goods. It accounts for roughly 12% of global trade by value, 30% of global container traffic, and a significant share of oil and LNG shipments. The Canal is operated by the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) of Egypt, which generated revenues of approximately $9.4bn in the 2022-23 financial year — revenues that have fallen sharply since the Houthi-driven diversion of container traffic. The Canal's strategic importance to global commerce is difficult to overstate.

The Ever Given: Six Days That Cost $9.6 Billion#

On March 23 2021, the container ship Ever Given — 400 metres long, one of the largest in the world — ran aground in a narrow section of the Suez Canal during a sandstorm, blocking the waterway in both directions. The blockage lasted six days, until March 29 2021. During that time, an estimated 369 ships were delayed or diverted. Lloyd's List estimated that the blockage disrupted approximately $9.6bn in daily trade. The Ever Given incident demonstrated, in concentrated form, the vulnerability of the global supply chain to a single point of failure. The Canal's width at the most constricted section is barely wider than the world's largest vessels, leaving no margin for error.

The Houthi Campaign: A Sustained Chokepoint Attack#

While the Ever Given was an accident, the Houthi campaign that began in November 2023 is deliberate and sustained. Houthi forces in Yemen, backed by Iran, began targeting commercial vessels they claimed were linked to Israel or its supporters in the Gaza conflict. Unlike the six-day Ever Given crisis, the Houthi campaign has continued for well over a year. The response from major container lines — rerouting via Cape of Good Hope — has effectively taken the Red Sea-Suez corridor out of service for commercial container shipping. This represents a longer and more economically damaging disruption than the Ever Given event, though the daily cost per ship is lower because the diversion option exists.

The Military Response and Its Limits#

The US and UK launched military operations targeting Houthi missile and drone launch sites in Yemen in January 2024 (Operation Prosperity Guardian, followed by UK-US joint strikes). Despite degrading Houthi capabilities, the attacks did not stop the campaign. Houthis have demonstrated an ability to absorb strikes and continue operations with remaining weapons stockpiles. Crucially, the attack threshold for commercial shipping has remained low enough that major carriers continue to assess the Red Sea as unsafe for their vessels. Until a political resolution to the Yemen conflict makes the Houthi campaign strategically redundant — or until military action fundamentally degrades their capability — the Suez Canal is likely to remain underutilised by commercial container traffic.

What Both Disruptions Have in Common#

The Ever Given and the Houthi campaign both illustrate the same structural vulnerability: global trade has concentrated too much of its volume through too few chokepoints. The Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Bab el-Mandeb are each single points of failure for significant portions of global commerce. Any one of them being disrupted — whether by accident, geopolitics, climate, or conflict — triggers ripple effects across global supply chains. The difference in 2023-2025 is that the disruption has lasted long enough to force structural adaptation: rerouted shipping, changed inventory strategies, and altered sourcing decisions.

What Businesses Should Learn#

The Suez Canal disruptions provide a clear lesson for supply chain planning: understand your chokepoint exposure and price it into your resilience strategy. For UK importers, this means knowing which of your supply routes pass through which maritime chokepoints, what the cost and lead time impact would be if those chokepoints were disrupted, and whether your safety stock and supplier diversification strategy provides adequate cover. AskBiz's dashboard flags supply chain risk by route and origin, helping you identify which product lines carry the highest chokepoint dependency and quantify what a disruption would cost.

• The Suez Canal handles 12% of global trade and 30% of global container traffic.
• The six-day Ever Given grounding in March 2021 and the Houthi campaign since November 2023 have shown what happens when this chokepoint is disrupted.
• The lessons for businesses are clear: supply chain resilience requires redundancy, and chokepoint dependency is a strategic risk.