At 07:37 local time on 8 June 2026, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the southern tip of Mindanao, near Sarangani and Davao Occidental, on the Cotabato Trench subduction system. The rupture began about 57 km down, an intermediate-depth thrust, and shook for around 70 seconds, wrecking buildings across General Santos City, Sarangani and South Cotabato, damaging a major hospital and sending a tsunami onto nearby coasts. Confirmed deaths reached at least 88 by 1 July, with 1,316 injured, 24 missing and around 113,300 homes damaged or destroyed.
It was the strongest quake to hit the Philippines since 1976, and as large by magnitude as the 2023 Kahramanmaraş rupture that killed nearly 60,000 people, yet it killed fewer than a hundred. The difference was depth and location, not vulnerability: the rupture struck offshore and 57 km down, so the same energy arrived at the surface already weakened, rather than beneath a shallow crustal fault under a city. The thrust also lifted the seabed, launching a tsunami that drowned at least two people and wrecking marine and fishing grounds along the uplifted coast. With non-life insurance penetration at just , almost none of the loss is covered, leaving the Philippines' sovereign and parametric layers as the primary shock-absorbers.