More than thirty container ships were idling outside Port Callas this week, the longest backlog the transshipment hub has recorded in three years, as a combination of staffing shortages and an aging crane fleet slows unloading to a crawl.

The port handles roughly one in eight containers that move between manufacturing hubs and retail markets across three continents, and the delay is already rippling outward. Fictional logistics firms say shipments that once took four days to clear the port are now taking two to three weeks.

“Everyone downstream feels this,” said a supply-chain analyst who tracks port congestion for a fictional freight consultancy. “A furniture retailer in one country and an electronics assembler in another are suddenly competing for the same delayed containers.”

Port authorities have attributed the slowdown to a wave of retirements among certified crane operators and delayed maintenance on several of the port’s oldest gantry cranes, two of which have been offline since early summer.

Shipping lines have begun rerouting some vessels to smaller regional ports, a workaround that eases pressure on Port Callas but adds cost and complexity elsewhere in the network.

“Ports like this one are chokepoints precisely because there’s no easy substitute,” the analyst said. “You can reroute around it, but you can’t really replace it.”