Common examples of force majeure fall into six broad categories: natural disasters, government actions, pandemics accompanied by government orders, armed conflict and civil unrest, external labor stoppages, and large-scale technology failures. Financial hardship is the boundary case people most often get wrong. Losing money on a deal, even a lot of money, is not force majeure. The event has to make performance impossible or illegal, not just unprofitable.
Natural Disasters and Acts of God
Hurricanes, earthquakes, catastrophic floods, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, and tornadoes are the textbook examples. Contracts often label these “Acts of God,” meaning a severe natural event no person caused and no reasonable precaution could have prevented.
Two things determine whether the disaster actually excuses performance. First, the connection has to be direct. A hurricane that destroys a supplier’s warehouse gives that supplier a strong argument for missed delivery deadlines. A manufacturer whose own facility is untouched but whose third-tier supplier was affected will have a much harder time. Courts look for proximate cause, not a loose chain of inconveniences.
Second, the event has to be genuinely severe. A heavy rainstorm that slows construction by a few days doesn’t qualify. Performance has to be truly impossible or impracticable, not just more annoying or expensive. Parties sometimes support their claims with historical weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Data Online system, which archives decades of weather records and provides certified copies for use in litigation.1National Centers for Environmental Information. Climate Data Online Showing that the event was a statistical outlier helps establish that it exceeded what anyone could have planned for.
Government Actions and Regulatory Changes
When a government makes your contractual obligation illegal, that’s about as clear a force majeure trigger as you’ll find. Trade embargoes, economic sanctions, export bans, new regulations, and eminent domain can all render a contract impossible to fulfill through no fault of either party. A manufacturer can’t deliver components if the federal government suddenly bans their export to the buyer’s country.
Executive orders and emergency declarations work the same way when they directly prohibit the activity the contract requires. During COVID-19, a bankruptcy court found that a governor’s executive order restricting restaurant operations qualified as “governmental action” under a lease’s force majeure clause. Courts don’t just ask whether a government action occurred. They measure how much of the performance it actually blocked.
The specific action must directly prohibit the specific activity in the contract. A new environmental regulation that increases costs by 15% doesn’t qualify. A regulation that makes the product illegal to sell does. Courts look for a straight line between the law and the impossibility.
Pandemics and Public Health Emergencies
COVID-19 turned this from a rarely invoked category into one of the most litigated areas of contract law. Pandemics can trigger force majeure, but the illness itself is rarely the legal barrier. What excuses performance is almost always the government response: mandatory shutdowns, quarantine orders, occupancy restrictions, and travel bans that physically or legally prevent a party from doing what the contract requires.
The distinction matters. A business that voluntarily closed out of caution has a far weaker claim than one ordered to shut down. Courts analyze whether the specific order prevented the specific performance at issue. A stay-at-home order that closed retail stores excuses a retailer from operating obligations, but it wouldn’t excuse the same retailer from making electronic payments on a loan, since the order didn’t prevent wire transfers.
Non-binding guidance from health agencies like the CDC generally doesn’t create the legal impossibility courts require. Recommendations aren’t orders. Contracts that specifically list “epidemic” or “pandemic” as triggering events provide stronger protection than those relying on catch-all language, since courts interpret these clauses narrowly and favor events the contract names.
Armed Conflict and Civil Unrest
War, invasion, terrorism, insurrection, and large-scale civil unrest are classic force majeure events. Sample force majeure clauses from international contracts routinely list war, hostilities, rebellion, revolution, insurrection, and acts of terrorism.2World Bank Group. Sample Force Majeure Clauses If an armed conflict destroys a transportation hub, shipping obligations through that hub are excused.
Scale is the gatekeeper. A localized protest that blocks one street for an afternoon doesn’t excuse a nationwide delivery obligation. The conflict has to disrupt operations or endanger personnel to the point where performance genuinely isn’t viable. Courts expect evidence that the unrest actually prevented the required activity, not that it made things uncomfortable or riskier.
Labor Stoppages and Industrial Actions
Workforce disruptions qualify when they’re genuinely outside the affected party’s control. The clearest examples are industry-wide strikes, general walkouts coordinated by third-party unions, and sector-wide lockouts that freeze operations across an entire industry. A nationwide rail strike that prevents a manufacturer from receiving raw materials gives that manufacturer a credible basis for invoking the clause.
The critical line runs between external disruptions and internal management problems. A company can’t invoke force majeure because its own employees quit over a wage dispute the company could have resolved. High turnover, poor working conditions, and failure to negotiate with your own workforce are manageable business risks, not extraordinary events beyond your control. Courts will probe whether the strike was truly external or whether reasonable negotiation could have prevented it.
Even when a labor disruption clearly qualifies, the affected party still needs to show it tried to work around the problem. Sourcing from alternative suppliers, rerouting shipments, or adjusting production are the mitigation efforts courts expect before they’ll excuse non-performance entirely.
Technology Failures and Cyberattacks
This is the category older contracts often miss. Large-scale technology failures, cyberattacks, and infrastructure outages can paralyze operations as effectively as a hurricane. A ransomware attack that takes down a company’s production system, or a major cloud outage that disables the platforms a company uses to deliver services, can make performance impossible through no fault of the affected party.
Modern contracts that cover these events typically reference computer failures, communication service interruptions, cyberattacks, and utility outages. The usual principles apply: the failure must be beyond the party’s reasonable control, and it must actually prevent performance rather than merely inconvenience it. A company that neglected basic cybersecurity and then suffered a predictable breach will have a harder time claiming the attack was unforeseeable.
If a force majeure clause was drafted before technology disruptions became routine, it probably doesn’t cover them. Courts won’t read events into a clause that doesn’t mention them, even if a disruption seems comparable to what is listed.
What Does Not Qualify
Knowing what falls outside force majeure matters as much as knowing what fits inside it. The most common mistake is treating financial hardship as an excusable event. Economic downturns, market crashes, currency fluctuations, increased material costs, and loss of profitability do not excuse performance. Courts consistently hold that economic hardship is a normal business risk that parties should anticipate and allocate through the contract’s pricing and risk-sharing terms.
The logic is straightforward. If you could still physically and legally do what the contract requires but it would cost you more than expected, that isn’t force majeure. A construction company that bid too low and then faced rising lumber prices can’t walk away by claiming market conditions made performance “impossible.” The contract became unprofitable, not impossible.
Supply chain disruptions sit in the gray area that trips people up. A hurricane that destroys your only possible source of raw materials could qualify. But if the same materials are available from another supplier at a higher price, most courts will say you’re obligated to buy from that alternative source, even at a significant loss. Force majeure protects against impossibility, not against bad economics. Losing a key customer, facing new competition, or discovering that a business model is no longer viable are all foreseeable commercial risks the clause was never designed to cover.
How the Clause’s Wording Decides What Counts
Courts read force majeure clauses narrowly, and this is where most failed claims collapse. If the clause lists specific events like earthquakes, floods, and war, a party trying to invoke it for a pandemic will struggle unless the clause also lists epidemics or contains sufficiently broad catch-all language. Federal courts have repeatedly held that only events specifically identified in the clause will excuse performance.
When clauses include catch-all phrases like “or any other event beyond the parties’ control,” courts apply a principle called ejusdem generis. In plain terms, the catch-all only covers events similar in kind to those specifically listed. A clause that lists natural disasters and then adds a catch-all probably covers volcanic eruptions even if they aren’t named, but it won’t stretch to cover a labor strike or a government regulation, because those are fundamentally different types of events.
The Uniform Commercial Code provides a statutory baseline for contracts involving the sale of goods. Under UCC Section 2-615, a seller is excused from timely delivery when performance becomes impracticable due to an unforeseen event both parties assumed wouldn’t happen, or when the seller is complying in good faith with a government regulation or order. The seller can’t just stop performing. If the disruption only affects part of the seller’s capacity, the seller must allocate remaining production fairly among customers and promptly notify the buyer of any expected delays.3Legal Information Institute. UCC 2-615 Excuse by Failure of Presupposed Conditions
A Qualifying Event Alone Isn’t Enough
Even when the event clearly fits one of the categories above, the party claiming relief still has to prove three things: the event was beyond its control, the event actually prevented performance, and reasonable steps were taken to work around it. Fail on any one, and the defense collapses.
Nearly every force majeure clause also requires prompt written notice to the other party, usually identifying the specific event, explaining how it prevents performance, and estimating how long the disruption will last. Some contracts set hard deadlines. Missing the notice window can waive the right to invoke the clause entirely, regardless of how legitimate the underlying event was. And the duty to mitigate keeps running. Courts expect reasonable efforts to find alternative ways to perform, limit the scope of non-performance, and resume full performance as soon as the obstacle clears.