The Hormuz Shock
Daily ship transits through the Strait of Hormuz — the corridor for roughly a fifth of the world's oil — with tankers broken out separately. Traffic ran near 130 ships a day for years, slid through late 2025, then collapsed in early 2026 to a handful of transits, the deepest disruption of any chokepoint in the AIS record; Brent crude on this dashboard spiked past $115 in the same weeks. Counts mix genuinely halted traffic with vessels running dark, and the series updates daily as the strait's partial recovery unfolds.
What does it show?
The strait that carries a fifth of the world's oil went from about 77 transits a day through 2025 to a low of 1 in 2026 — the deepest disruption of any trade chokepoint on record here. The latest week averages 4 transits a day.
Methodology
Daily ship transits through the Strait of Hormuz from IMF PortWatch AIS-derived data, as 7-day trailing averages for all vessels and for tankers separately. AIS-based counts can understate true movements when vessels disable transponders in conflict zones, so the collapse mixes genuinely halted traffic with dark shipping; either way the strait stopped functioning normally. Brent crude on this dashboard spiked above $115 in the same weeks.