The Hormuz Shock: the world's busiest oil gate is down 95%.
Since the Middle East conflict escalated in March 2026, daily transits through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed from ~101 ships a day to barely 5. The Red Sea route never recovered from the 2023–24 Houthi crisis — and the world now sails around Africa. Every figure below is the real daily transit record from an open satellite-based vessel-transit dataset.
STRAIT OF HORMUZ FROM ORBIT · SHIPPING CHANNEL + NARROWEST PASSAGE MARKED · NORMALLY ~101 SHIPS/DAY PASS THIS GAPContains modified third-party Earth-observation data
Market reaction · Brent crude around the Hormuz shock
BRENT FRONT-MONTH (US$/BBL)
REAL QUOTED PRICES, NOT MODELLED · 27 FEB → 17 JUN 2026 · SHADED: PEAK DISRUPTION WINDOW
BEFORE · 27 FEB
$71.32
+2 SESSIONS · 2 MAR
$77.24
PEAK · MARCH
~$126
EASING · 17 JUN
$78.24
BRENT BROKE $100/BBL ON 8 MAR FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FOUR YEARS, MARCH WAS THE LARGEST MONTHLY OIL-PRICE INCREASE ON RECORD. WTI ROSE LESS: THE BRENT–WTI SPREAD HIT $25/BBL ON 31 MAR, THE WIDEST IN OVER FIVE YEARS. EUROPEAN GAS (TTF) JUMPED FROM ~€30 TO ABOVE €60/MWH IN EARLY MARCH BEFORE FALLING BACK. AS REPORTED, PUBLIC MARKET DATA.
CIRCLE = CURRENT 30-DAY FLOW · RING = 2023 BASELINE · RED = COLLAPSE, LIME = SURGE
What the data says
Hormuz (−95%) is the story: a fifth of global oil normally passes here. The transit record shows the daily count falling from ~101/day (Feb 2026) to under 5/day from mid-March 2026 — effectively closed to merchant traffic.
The world reroutes, not stops: Cape of Good Hope transits are up +91% versus the 2023 baseline — absorbing both the Red Sea diversion (since late 2023) and the Gulf shock. Suez is down −49% and Bab el-Mandeb down −54% over the same window.
Grain angle: longer routes tie up bulkers, tighten freight for Baltic and Black Sea grain — a cost signal our Grain Flow tracks port by port.
Compare it yourself: our Maritime Trade Analytics tool lets you set any ports and chokepoints side by side on the same public vessel-transit record — weekly calls and trade volume by vessel class, back to 2019.
BASELINE = JAN–OCT 2023 AVG · LAST 30D TO 2026-06-14
TWO REAL DISRUPTIONS IN THE RECORD
The same daily transit feed already captured the Red Sea reroute and the Panama drought — years before the Hormuz shock.
Both panels below are computed directly from the open daily vessel-transit record — no modelling, no illustration. The Red Sea crisis (Houthi attacks from late 2023) and the Panama Canal drought (2023–24) are visible in the actual counts: traffic collapses at one gate and reappears at the reroute. Baseline is the Jan–Oct 2023 daily average; the latest window runs to 14 Jun 2026.
The Red Sea reroute, in real transits
REAL — DAILY TRANSIT RECORD
Change in daily transits versus the Jan–Oct 2023 baseline. As Houthi attacks shut the Bab el-Mandeb / Suez corridor, traffic did not vanish — it rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, 10–14 extra sailing days.
CORRIDOR COLLAPSECAPE REROUTE SURGE
The Panama drought, in real transits
REAL — DAILY TRANSIT RECORD
Weekly average daily transits through the Panama Canal. The 2023–24 drought forced draft and slot restrictions; the count fell from ~31/day to a trough near 19/day in January 2024, then recovered as rains returned.
PANAMA WEEKLY TRANSITS2023 BASELINE
BOTH PANELS ARE COMPUTED FROM THE OPEN DAILY-TRANSIT RECORD. FIGURES ARE REAL TRANSIT COUNTS, NOT MODELLED. THE RECORD COVERS TRANSIT CALLS AND ESTIMATED TRADE VOLUME — NOT VESSEL OWNERSHIP, DWELL OR DARK-ACTIVITY.
All 28 monitored gates — where from, where to, what changed
GATE
ROUTE (FROM → TO)
2023
LAST 30D
Δ
FULL CATALOG · DAILY TRANSIT RECORD · GATES WITH >=5 TRANSITS/DAY BASELINE · SORTED BY ABSOLUTE CHANGE
The timeline: how the world's busiest oil gate emptied out
2024–2025 — peak normality. At its busiest, Hormuz averaged ~108 transits a day (Sep 2024): a continuous procession of tankers and LNG carriers feeding Asia and Europe. Roughly a fifth of all seaborne oil and a third of global LNG funnel through a channel barely 33 km wide at its narrowest.
2023–2024 — the Red Sea bleed. Houthi attacks on shipping cut Bab el-Mandeb (−54%) and Suez (−49%) roughly in half. Carriers began the long detour around the Cape of Good Hope (+91%) — adding 10–14 days and burning the freight market's spare capacity. This was the warm-up.
2026 — the Hormuz shock. As the Middle East conflict escalated, Hormuz transits fell off a cliff: from ~95/day in February 2026 to a trough of 0/day in late March 2026, settling near 5/day since. For a merchant fleet, the strait is effectively shut. There is no second Hormuz — unlike the Red Sea, there is no Cape to sail around. The oil that normally exits the Gulf by sea has nowhere else to go.
Hormuz: tankers vs total traffic · weekly
TANKERS TRACK TOTAL ALMOST EXACTLY — THIS GATE IS ABOUT OIL. DAILY TRANSIT RECORD.
Who feels it, and when
Refiners (days): Gulf crude buyers reroute or draw down stocks within a week.
Freight (weeks): every diverted cargo ties up a vessel for an extra fortnight — tanker and dry-bulk rates climb together as the global fleet shrinks in effective supply.
Grain & food (months): longer routes and pricier bunkers feed into the cost of moving Black Sea and Baltic grain. Our Grain Flow layer already prices this, port by port.
Consumers (one quarter): fuel and freight inflation reaches the pump and the shelf with the usual lag — which is exactly why an early, daily signal is worth paying for.
Why this is hard to fake — and easy to verify
Every figure on this page is the real daily transit record from an open, satellite-based vessel-transit dataset that estimates vessel transit counts and trade volume per chokepoint from satellite vessel tracking. No insider feeds, no proprietary black box on the inputs — anyone can pull the same numbers from public data. What we add is the daily cadence, the cross-gate context, and the link to commodity flows — the analysis layer, not the raw data.
Limitations stated plainly: the transit counts are not tonnage (estimated trade volume is a separate field), and the data carries a processing lag of a few days and updates daily. None of this changes the headline — in the transit record Hormuz is down ~95% versus its 2023 baseline, Suez −49%, Bab el-Mandeb −54%, and the Cape of Good Hope +91%.
Scope note: the dataset publishes transit calls and estimated trade volume — not vessel ownership, sanctioned linkage, dwell time, or dark-activity. Those deeper layers are not derivable from this open feed, so we do not present them here.
