MarineTraffic
Greek crowd-sourced AIS vessel-tracking platform, now owned by Kpler.
MarineTraffic counted 132 Hormuz transits in The Week to 27 September 2026, while the IMF's PortWatch dashboard logged one on 27 September. The platform sees only the ships that broadcast, and under a blockade many do not.
Last refreshed: 1 October 2026 · Appears in 2 active topics
Timeline for MarineTraffic
Counted 132 Hormuz transits in the week to 27 September
Iran Conflict 2026: Iran loads no crude for a whole monthMentioned in: QatarEnergy suspends gas as ships move
Iran Conflict 2026Mentioned in: Sanctioned tankers slip Hormuz on day one
Iran Conflict 2026Background
MarineTraffic is a Greek vessel-tracking platform, founded in 2007 by Dimitris Lekkas, then a professor at the University of the Aegean, as an academic project Fed by volunteer-run shore receivers. Kpler, the Brussels-based maritime and commodities data group, bought it in March 2023 alongside the rival tracker FleetMon. The platform kept its own name and Greek base inside Kpler's network.
It works by collecting Automatic Identification System broadcasts, the position signals ships transmit, from receivers on land, at SEA and in orbit. Kpler puts the combined network above 13,000 receivers, logging more than 300,000 vessels a day. Port authorities, freight brokers, commodity traders, journalists and researchers all read the result.
That makes it one of the few public instruments for watching a blockade, and it is cited as such alongside Kpler and LSEG. It also makes its blind SPOT consequential. A ship that turns off its transponder disappears from the record, so the platform's numbers describe compliant traffic and understate the rest. Read its figures as a floor rather than a tally.
The transit counts no longer agree
Measuring the strait of Hormuz has become the service's hardest problem. Its own count of 132 transits in The Week to 27 September 2026 sits against one transit logged by the IMF PortWatch dashboard for 27 September, and against a daily brief drawn from transponder data that put 135 ships holding position away from berth at 23:50 UTC on 30 September. Three instruments, three irreconcilable numbers.
Vessels running the blockade switch their transponders off, so nothing broadcast-based can give a true crossing count, a limit its parent Kpler states of its own trackers too. Where the platform's data is firmest, the picture is Stark: Iran loaded no crude at all in The Gulf during September 2026, the first blank month of the blockade.
What is MarineTraffic and how does it track ships?
How did MarineTraffic confirm the Hormuz tanker transits in April 2026?
Is MarineTraffic data reliable for tracking sanctioned vessels?
Who owns MarineTraffic?
