The 2021-2022 US port supply chain crisis was historic and is fully resolved operationally — but supply chain pressure is rising again in 2026, for different reasons

Summary

The 2021-2022 US port crisis was the worst container-shipping congestion event on record. At its peak (January 9, 2022) 109 container ships were queued off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, up from a pre-pandemic norm near zero. Average West Coast transit time roughly doubled, from about 400 hours to a peak near 700 hours in early 2022. Combined LA/Long Beach container volume actually hit a record high of just over 20 million TEU in 2021 (vs. 17.0 million in 2019) even as the queue built — the ports were moving more cargo than ever and still falling behind demand. The vessel backlog reached zero for the first time in 25 months in November 2022, and the industry group tracking it declared the crisis operationally over. By that narrow measure (ships waiting, backlog), the 2021-2022 crisis is fully cleared and has been for roughly four years. However, a broader measure of global supply chain strain, the NY Fed's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), shows a fresh and unrelated spike: after being negative (below-average pressure) for most of 2023-2025, it rose to 1.82 in April 2026 — the highest reading since July 2022 — driven by Red Sea/Houthi shipping diversions, tariff-driven front-loading, and localized 2026 terminal congestion (e.g., Jacksonville dwell times nearly tripling). This is a materially smaller and differently-caused pressure event than the 2021-2022 crisis, not a resumption of it.

How big was the original crisis (2020-2022)

• Vessel queue: Backlog began building from mid-October 2020, reached 42 ships by February 2021, fell to just 9 by June 2021, then rebuilt to a record 73 ships by September 19, 2021, 87 ships by October 10, 2021 (60 waiting offshore), and finally peaked at 109 ships on January 9, 2022.
• Transit/wait times: Average West Coast shipping time, roughly 400 hours pre-pandemic, rose through early 2021 and peaked near 700 hours in early 2022 — nearly double normal.
• Throughput: Queried from askamerica (transport.bts_port_teu): combined LA + Long Beach total container throughput was 16.97M TEU (2019), 17.33M TEU (2020), a record 20.06M TEU (2021), and 16.54M TEU for the partial (Jan-Oct) 2022 period before the source dataset stops. National top-10-port throughput followed the same pattern: 43.7M TEU (2019) to 50.5M TEU (2021). This confirms the crisis was a demand surge overwhelming capacity, not a volume collapse.
• Cause: COVID-19 disruption (worker illness/absence, factory shutdowns), a sharp pandemic-era shift in consumer spending from services to goods, chassis/container/warehouse-labor shortages, and later compounded by the Russia-Ukraine war's effect on global shipping.
• Macroeconomic cost: The San Francisco Fed estimated supply chain disruptions accounted for about 60% of the above-trend rise in headline US inflation in 2021-2022. Moody's Analytics estimated the disruptions cost roughly 2 million vehicle sales in 2021 and left US employment about 1.4 million jobs lower as of Q1 2022 versus a no-disruption counterfactual. No single, authoritative dollar/GDP total was found in web research; these are the two most commonly cited quantified estimates.

How much has cleared

The acute, headline symptom is fully cleared and has been since late 2022. The vessel backlog at San Pedro Bay (LA/Long Beach) reached zero for the first time in 25 months in November 2022, and an industry working group formally declared the ship backlog ended. Freight rates tell the same story from a different angle: the Drewry World Container Index stood at $2,123/40ft container as of March 2026, down more than 70% from mid-2024 peaks (Asia-US West Coast had hit $6,840/FEU, Asia-US East Coast $8,113/FEU) and in some lanes now below pre-pandemic levels — vessel overcapacity and weak demand have flipped the market from a seller's to a buyer's market.

But "cleared" is not "back to a placid pre-2020 baseline," and it is not evenly distributed. As of 2026, port performance diverges sharply by terminal: Norfolk and Seattle dwell times sit above 110 hours; Jacksonville's dwell time nearly tripled, from about 38 hours in April 2025 to 82-106 hours by mid-2026; Savannah and Houston are running comparatively low dwell times; LA averages 4-5 days and NY/NJ 5-7 days. Causes are now structural/geopolitical rather than pandemic-driven: Red Sea Houthi attacks are still forcing an estimated 10-14 additional transit days on Asia-Europe routes via the Cape of Good Hope; tariff-driven import front-loading through late 2025 pushed volume the terminal network couldn't fully absorb; and the West Coast's 2024 dockworker labor standoff (ILA-USMX, a 3-day October 2024 strike, contract friction continuing into 2025-2026) has pushed some shippers to divert cargo toward East and Gulf Coast ports.

The GSCPI captures this: it was negative (below-average global pressure) through most of 2023-2025, with its last negative reading in November 2025, before rising to 0.55 (Feb 2026), 0.68 (Mar 2026), and 1.82 (Apr 2026) — the highest level since July 2022, though still well under the December 2021 record of 4.47. In plain terms: roughly 60-70% of the way back toward 2021-22 peak pressure on this one index reading, but concentrated in specific lanes/terminals and driven by causes (Red Sea diversions, tariffs, labor risk) unrelated to the original pandemic-driven crisis, not a broad-based recurrence.

Data and methodology notes

What askamerica supplied directly: the LA/Long Beach and national top-10-port combined TEU throughput figures (transport.bts_port_teu), queried live in this session. That table's own source (BTS Port Performance Freight Statistics Program) stopped publishing after October 2022 and has not been refreshed since — verified via describe_table — so it cannot show the 2023-2026 recovery period directly; the 2022 figure above is a partial year (10 of 12 months). askamerica's econ.trade_imports table, checked as a possible current-era substitute, is declared to cover 2013-2025 but currently only has 2025 loaded (a mid-backfill gap), so it could not supply a multi-year import-value trend either — this is a genuine corpus coverage gap for current-era port/trade volume, not a data-absence finding.

What came from web research (not askamerica): the vessel-backlog timeline and peak (109 ships, Jan 2022), West Coast transit-time figures, the NY Fed GSCPI values, Drewry World Container Index rates, 2026 terminal dwell times, the ILA/USMX labor situation, and the SF Fed/Moody's macroeconomic estimates. A direct fetch of the NY Fed's own GSCPI page (newyorkfed.org/research/policy/gscpi) returned only page navigation, not the underlying data table (it is likely rendered client-side), so the specific GSCPI values in this report are drawn from press coverage of that data (PYMNTS, MacroMicro) rather than a parsed primary-source table — flagged here rather than presented as a direct read of the New York Fed's own series.

Every query behind this report

7 warehouse calls ran in this session, in order. Each is reproducible against the same snapshot.

SELECT port_name, EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) AS yr, SUM(teu) AS teu
FROM transport.bts_port_teu
WHERE type = 'Loaded Imports' AND (port_name ILIKE '%Los Angeles%' OR port_name ILIKE '%Long Beach%')
GROUP BY port_name, EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) ORDER BY port_name, yr

SELECT DISTINCT type FROM transport.bts_port_teu

SELECT DISTINCT port_name FROM transport.bts_port_teu

SELECT port_name, EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) AS yr, SUM(teu) AS teu
FROM transport.bts_port_teu
WHERE port_name IN ('Los Angeles, CA', 'Long Beach, CA')
GROUP BY port_name, EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) ORDER BY port_name, yr

SELECT EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) AS yr, SUM(teu) AS total_teu
FROM transport.bts_port_teu
GROUP BY EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) ORDER BY yr

SELECT year, SUM(value_usd) AS total_import_value
FROM econ.trade_imports
WHERE geo_level = 'world'
GROUP BY year ORDER BY year

SELECT EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) AS yr, SUM(teu) AS teu
FROM transport.bts_port_teu
WHERE port_name IN ('Los Angeles, CA', 'Long Beach, CA')
GROUP BY EXTRACT(year FROM report_date) ORDER BY yr