I'll preface this by saying I work at a large container terminal. Containers are basically the backbone of the economy and, while there's obviously much more to it (stocks, property, etc), they're still a pretty good indicator of how things are going. Most of the things we buy on a day to day basis - clothes, electronics, food, car parts, etc - come through container terminals. And on an industry level, it's looking quite rough.
Basically, the way the UK works is that it imports a lot of stuff from the Far East (China, Japan, Korea, etc). The scale of this is huge - like, tens of thousands of articulated lorries worth of stuff a week. This stuff arrives on ships which are usually the equivalent of ten thousand HGVs each. In a general sense, there are probably as many as ten or fifteen of these per week across the major ports (Felixstowe, Southampton, London Gateway) and a lot of smaller ships at smaller ports (Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bristol etc). So, if you're unfamiliar with it, the capacity and volumes here are truly enormous. And this generally goes well, and while there are annual peaks and troughs of demand (less stuff after Chinese New Year, more stuff before Christmas), it's still justified the growth in vessel size and service regularity over the last 10/20 years.
The demand doesn't seem to match them anymore. These things operate on economies of scale, and to run a ship with 20,000 TEU (20ft Equivalent Units) you need to fill a lot (a LOT) of spaces on the vessel with cargo in order to pay for the fuel and staffing costs and then make money. To try and mitigate that, ships were being cancelled and not even leaving Asia in an attempt by shipping lines to artificially increase demand by reducing capacity on the Asia to North Europe trade routes. This is usually expected in March and April, but not to the extent we've seen this year, and not in February, and certainly not in August - November as we saw last year. Also remember at this point that they wouldn't simply do this if it was just one or two markets - these ships serve ports in multiple countries, and bigger services like these have services which connect that cargo to more local destinations.
An interesting (and hopefully reasonably jargon-free) article on this is here:
https://theloadstar.com/lack-of-cargo-s ... ellations/ What I'm saying here is: the picture isn't good. It wasn't good before Coronavirus, and while we haven't received any new intelligence or confirmation of additional new void sailings, it doesn't take much to go from stuff not being manufactured due to Coronavirus keeping factories closed and reducing the ability for imports to even be made, therefore meaning less stuff coming into the UK for people to buy, and in turn the impacts on inflation etc which that may have. It's not for me to declare a crisis or anything, but it wouldn't really surprise me at this point.