One 400m ship blocked the Suez Canal for six days — a single point of failure

On 23 March 2021, the Ever Given — a 400-metre, 224,000-ton container ship carrying 20,000 TEU — ran aground in the Suez Canal during a sandstorm. The ship, operated by Taiwan's Evergreen Marine and owned by Japan's Shoei Kisen Kaisha, lodged diagonally across the 265-metre-wide waterway and blocked all traffic in both directions.

For six days, one of the world's busiest shipping routes was closed. Approximately 400 ships queued at either end. The canal handles about 12% of global trade; Lloyd's List estimated the blockage held up $9.6 billion worth of goods per day. The Suez Canal Authority said losses and damages would likely exceed $1 billion.

The grounding was an accident — wind, human error and the ship's size. But the structural vulnerability was a decision: the shipping industry had spent two decades building ever-larger vessels to cut per-container costs, and the canal's margins had not kept pace. A ship 400 metres long in a channel 265 metres wide has no room for error. The industry had optimised for efficiency and removed the slack that absorbs a bad day.