■ A maritime traffic jam grew to more than 200 vessels Friday outside the Suez Canal.

A maritime traffic jam grew to more than 200 vessels Friday outside the Suez Canal and some vessels began changing course as dredgers and tugboats worked to free a container ship that is stuck sideways in the waterway and disrupting global shipping.

One salvage expert said freeing the cargo ship, the Ever Given, could take up to a week in the best-case scenario and warned of possible structural problems on the vessel as it remains wedged.

The Ever Given, owned by the Japanese firm Shoei Kisen KK, got wedged Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal, about 3.7 miles north of the southern entrance, near the city of Suez.

Dredgers have stopped removing sand around the bow of the vessel and tugboats were preparing another towing attempt, said Lt. Gen. Osama Rabei, head of the Suez Canal Authority, in a statement Friday night. There was no word on whether they have managed to budge the skyscraper-sized vessel, and previous attempts with tugboats were unsuccessful.

A team from Boskalis, a Dutch firm specializing in salvaging, was working with the canal authority with tugboats and a specialized suction dredger at the port side of the cargo ship’s bow. Egyptian authorities have prohibited media access to the site.

“It’s a complex technical operation” that will require several attempts to free the vessel, Rabei said in a statement.

Attempts earlier Friday to free it failed, said Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, the technical manager of the Ever Given.