Red Sea and Suez Canal traffic has been recovering through 2026, but unevenly and well below pre-crisis levels. Drewry data showed weekly container ship transits rising from roughly 41 to 48 in late September 2026, against around 80 a week before the crisis began — real recovery, but still close to half of normal volume.
Carrier behavior has split. Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, CMA CGM and COSCO have each moved selected loops back through the canal; Evergreen, ONE, HMM and Yang Ming have not. Every carrier that has returned has made it explicitly conditional on security conditions holding, not a permanent routing decision.
That conditionality is the key fact for planning purposes: a US security advisory in late September 2026 reported renewed Houthi attack activity, which is a reminder that this remains a live security situation, not a resolved one. An analyst quoted by Seatrade in 2026 judged a large-scale return of container ships to the Red Sea unlikely this year.
For a China–Europe shipment, the practical implication is that routing — Cape of Good Hope versus Suez — should be confirmed per booking rather than assumed from a prior shipment, since carriers are adjusting loop by loop as conditions shift. We track which services on a given lane are currently running via which route before quoting transit time.