A powerful eruption of Indonesia’s iconic Anak Krakatau volcano has triggered widespread travel chaos across the archipelago, leaving more than 270,000 passengers stranded after more than 2,000 flights were grounded and key airports extended shutdowns into a second consecutive day.
The eruption, which began late Friday in the Sunda Strait roughly 150 kilometers southwest of Jakarta, has sent towering lava fountains streaming into the sky and plumes of volcanic ash drifting across heavily populated regions including the national capital and Lampung province. Seismic activity remained elevated and unstable throughout the weekend, with the most recent outburst recorded at 20:23 local time on Sunday, according to Indonesian geological authorities.
By Monday, Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport—one of the busiest air hubs in Southeast Asia—and three additional affected airports announced extensions to their temporary closures until 18:00 local time Monday, after continuous monitoring detected unsafe levels of volcanic ash in surrounding airspace. Volcanic plumes reached altitudes of up to 6,000 meters on the Java side of the volcano and as high as 15,000 meters over Sumatra, according to Indonesia’s meteorological agency BMKG, with ash also falling across parts of Banten, Java’s westernmost province.
The disruption has rippled across daily life in the region: local schools shifted all classes to remote learning, and commercial shipping operations through the busy Sunda Strait have also faced major interruptions. Long, snaking queues formed in departure halls at Soekarno-Hatta on Monday as stranded travelers crowded service desks to seek ticket refunds, rebookings, and updated information on rescheduled flights.
For many travelers, the extended shutdown has turned routine or celebratory trips into stressful ordeals. A newlywed Malaysian couple, who just finished a week-long honeymoon in Bali, told reporters they face a five-day wait until their next available flight back to Kuala Lumpur, scheduled for September 11. “We only prepared enough money for our honeymoon and were supposed to go home yesterday,” 29-year-old Amir Hamzah told Malaysia’s national news agency Bernama. “We thought we would just sleep at the airport for a few hours and then take the morning flight home on Monday. We never thought we would end up being stuck here for days.”
Other stranded passengers have adopted a resigned outlook amid the unpredictable natural event. “This is nature, after all. So I have to accept it, because when it comes to nature, there’s no choice. Now I’m just waiting for the next update from the airline,” 58-year-old business traveler Suhardi, who was due to travel from Jakarta to Lampung for work, told Reuters.
Indonesia’s Geological Agency has issued a stark warning that the risk of additional large eruptions in the coming days remains high, while authorities have established a 3-kilometer exclusion zone around the active crater, barring all land access to the area and prohibiting commercial ships from passing through the restricted maritime zone around the volcano. In a reassuring update, however, officials confirmed there is no current tsunami warning linked to the volcano’s recent activity.
Indonesia’s Transport Minister Dudy Purwagandhi noted that authorities cannot yet predict when the closures will end, due to the highly dynamic and shifting volcanic activity and weather patterns. “We cannot ascertain when this will end due to the dynamic weather,” he said, adding that air quality and ash spread monitoring is being conducted every 30 minutes across affected airport zones to track whether ash plumes are expanding or receding.
Anak Krakatau—meaning “Child of Krakatoa”—rose from the sea in the early 1900s, forming in the massive caldera left by the catastrophic 1883 eruption of the original Mount Krakatoa, one of the most destructive volcanic events in recorded history. The volcano has seen sporadic activity for more than a century, but a major 2018 collapse triggered a massive tsunami that killed more than 400 people and displaced and injured thousands across coastal areas of Java and Sumatra.
Indonesia sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 40,000-kilometer horseshoe of tectonic activity that wraps around the Pacific Ocean basin. Roughly 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 75% of all active volcanoes on Earth—totaling 452 active volcanic systems—are located along the ring, making the country one of the most geologically active nations on the planet.