6 Global Events That Disrupted Supply Chains in 2025

Global supply chains have become increasingly interconnected — and fragile — over the past decade. Lean inventories, just-in-time models, geographic concentration, and digital dependencies have made networks efficient but also more exposed to cascading shocks. In 2025, that fragility has been laid bare.

This year has witnessed a convergence of man-made and natural disruptions, including trade wars, cyberattacks, mine accidents, floods, wildfires, and typhoons.

In this post, we break down some of the most significant events that caused supply chain disruptions of 2025 — what happened, why it mattered, and how they reshaped the global movement of goods and materials.

In January 2025, a series of fast-moving wildfires — including the Eaton Fire in Altadena and the Hughes Fire in Lake Hughes — burned through over 54,000 acres across Southern California, destroying multiple neighborhoods and damaging local infrastructure.

The fires were not fully contained until late January. While the Inland Empire’s logistics hubs (e.g., Riverside, Fontana, San Bernardino) avoided direct fire damage, power outages, road closures, and infrastructure strain rippled through the region’s supply networks. Preventative power shutdowns affected manufacturing operations, even in areas outside the direct fire zone.

While immediate warehouse or freight disruptions were minimal, experts warned that rebuilding efforts could create significant demand surges for construction materials, warehousing, and storage over the next 2–3 years.

Items like drywall, cabinetry, plumbing, and roofing materials are expected to face shortages once reconstruction begins, creating downstream bottlenecks in the building materials supply chain. Temporary storage demand for these goods is also projected to rise sharply, driving up warehouse rents and space scarcity in the Los Angeles area.

Additionally, local retail supply chains saw shifts in consumer behavior, as displaced residents began shopping in surrounding areas, altering inventory flows and demand planning for grocers and retailers.

On September 8, 2025, a catastrophic mudslide (also described as a “mud rush”) hit the Grasberg copper mine, one of the world’s largest. The incident occurred in its Block Cave section, causing fatalities and leading to the immediate suspension of all operations as Freeport-McMoRan declared force majeure.

The disaster disrupted the mine’s infrastructure and led to substantial uncertainty around when full operations could resume — Freeport estimates a phased restart, with parts of the mine and supporting units likely ramping up only over 2026–2027.

The sudden halt slashed copper output by an estimated 591,000 metric tons (≈ 2.6 % of prior global production), tightening an already constrained market and pushing copper prices to a 15-month high.

This shock propagated through multiple industries that depend on copper — including electronics, wiring, electric motors, power infrastructure, and construction. Producers faced reduced availability of copper inputs, longer lead times, and pressure to seek alternate sources or adapt with material substitutions.

On August 31, 2025, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) suffered a major cyberattack that compromised its global IT infrastructure, forcing the company to shut down production systems, retail ordering, and internal applications as a containment measure.

The shutdown rippled sharply through JLR’s supply chain. Factory lines across the UK, India, Brazil, and Slovakia paused operations, stranding parts, disrupting assembly schedules, and leaving suppliers—especially smaller tier-2 or tier-3 vendors—with halted orders and cash flow stress.

According to FAIR-MAM modelling by SAFE and the FAIR Institute, the incident is expected to cost between $1.2 billion and $1.9 billion, more than half of JLR’s FY2025 net profit. Daily net revenue losses averaged $26 million, with extended downtime rippling through a supply network of 104,000 UK workers and hundreds of suppliers

Over time, JLR extended the production halt (into early October) as it rebuilt its systems securely, further intensifying supply disruptions. Some suppliers reportedly shut their own operations or laid off workers due to uncertainty, and JLR instituted accelerated invoice payments and government-backed aid to support the ecosystem.

On April 4, 2025, in response to escalating tariff measures by the U.S., China introduced stricter export controls on seven rare earth elements and related magnet materials (e.g., samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, yttrium).

The restrictions included licensing requirements, quotas, and regulatory scrutiny on end users to prevent diversion to strategic or military applications. Because China controls a large share of global rare earth refining and magnet production, the restrictions created immediate bottlenecks for industries relying on these inputs—particularly in electronics, electric vehicles, renewable energy, aerospace, and defense.

The automotive industry was among the hardest hit by China’s April 2025 rare earth export restrictions.

With limited stockpiles and virtually no alternative refining capacity outside China, automakers quickly began to feel the strain. Industry groups like CLEPA (Europe) and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (U.S.) warned of cascading component shortages that could idle production lines within weeks if licenses were not granted swiftly.

The effects were immediate. Ford was forced to temporarily shut down its Chicago Explorer SUV plant in May due to magnet shortages, with CEO Jim Farley describing procurement as “hand-to-mouth” on a daily basis. Suzuki halted production of its Swift subcompact model between May 26 and June 6 for similar reasons. Suppliers in Europe also suspended operations as inventories dried up.

In late September 2025, Super Typhoon Ragasa, the most powerful storm to hit East Asia that year, slammed into Taiwan, China, and the Philippines with winds exceeding 150 mph and torrential rain.

Across southern China, major ports — including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong — suspended operations as storm surges and flooding battered coastal infrastructure. Terminals such as Yantian, CCT, SCT, and MCT were closed, allowing only limited outbound container movements. The storm struck just before China’s Golden Week holiday, amplifying the risk of vessel bunching and shipping backlogs across Southeast Asia, where ports were already experiencing two to three days of congestion.

The semiconductor sector was hit particularly hard. In Guangdong, Foxconn suspended operations at key iPhone component plants ahead of Ragasa’s landfall, coinciding with Apple’s latest product launch. While TSMC avoided catastrophic damage, localized flooding and power outages raised concerns over chip production bottlenecks and longer lead times for downstream industries. With ports offline and manufacturing halted, freight costs rose as rerouting intensified, compounding existing strain from tariffs.

In early June 2025, United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI) — one of the largest food distributors in North America, supplying more than 30,000 stores, including Whole Foods — was hit by a major cyberattack that forced it to shut down portions of its IT systems. UNFI took its ordering, shipping, and receiving platforms offline to contain the breach, shifting to manual processes and disrupting normal operations for several days.

The cyberattack had a tangible, nationwide ripple effect across the U.S. food supply chain. With core systems offline, order fulfillment was delayed, deliveries were missed, and retailers faced temporary stockouts and empty shelves, particularly in perishable categories. UNFI estimated a $350–400 million hit to net sales for fiscal 2025 due to lost business and remediation costs. Suppliers, depending on UNFI’s distribution network, also suffered disruptions, unable to process purchase orders or replenish inventories at normal cadence.