Royal Mail are having a bad Friday with consequent challenges for online retailers attempting to despatch parcels before the weekend. There’s a Royal Mail computer system issue preventing customers from paying for postage with PayPal.
Those with a Royal Mail credit account will be grateful that they’ll be able to despatch and process orders as normal, but both Paypal payments and OBA manifesting are currently unavailable.
Temporary Royal Mail computer system issue
A critical technical issue has affected Royal mail computer systems. We regret that both Paypal payments and OBA manifesting are currently unavailable. Our OBA (credit account) customers can continue to despatch and process orders as usual.
Our engineers are working hard to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we will provide further updates as soon as we are able.
We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.
– Royal Mail at 10:54 16th November 2018
This is without a doubt a major incident as it leaves consumer and those accessing Royal Mail services as a personal customer unable to make payments for their postage. Business customers will be unable to perform manifesting which could have knock on effects for tracking.
Those who use Royal Mail often don’t have a suitable alternative courier they can switch their shipments to. Royal Mail is still the country’s default for small lightweight parcels, large letters and products shipped via letter post. The smaller sellers who rely on Royal Mail are also those most likely to pay via PayPal rather than be an account customer and if they can’t despatch today may well have no alternative other than to go an queue at the Post Office and pay in person. If that’s you then we’d recommend getting to the Post Office as early in the day as possible as queues may be longer than normal.
We’ll keep you updated throughout the day as Royal Mail release more news, but currently there is no indication as to who long the Royal Mail Computer System issue will last or what caused it.
Update – PayPal working again
We can confirm that PayPal payments are working as usual. Our engineers are still working on fixing manifesting. We will provide further updates as soon as we can.
– Royal Mail Nov 16, 11:26
Update 2 – Manifesting working again
We are happy to announce that manifesting is starting to return to normal. Please allow a short while for your manifests to complete. If you have any failures, please attempt to regenerate them when possible.
We will provide further updates as soon as we are able.
– Royal Mail Nov 16, 11:55
17 Responses
Things seemed to be going quite well in the last couple of months with Click & Drop, however this shows that they still don’t have a handle of how to create a resilient system.
This isn’t a Click & Drop issue, it was down across all of Royal Mail if you actually read the status properly.
Looks like they got it sorted.
Thanks for the heads up Chris!
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Update – We are happy to announce that manifesting is starting to return to normal. Please allow a short while for your manifests to complete. If you have any failures, please attempt to regenerate them when possible.
We will provide further updates as soon as we are able.
Nov 16, 11:55 GMT
Update – We can confirm that PayPal payments are working as usual. Our engineers are still working on fixing manifesting. We will provide further updates as soon as we can.
Nov 16, 11:26 GMT
Here is a solution to all these Royal Mail issues ……….. USE HERMES!
Unfortunately I send large letters only for 79p and don’t trust Hermes as they have lost four parcels in one month
Advantages of Hermes:
1. Pay for the label up front so not enormous bills in Jan
2. They leave safe (some people dont like this but I find the majority of our customers do)
3. When they leave safe they now take a pic that is uploaded to the tracking. This can be seen online by verifying postcode
4. They are generally cheaper than their competitors.
5 If they loose a parcel they are fairly good at reimbursements and they refund the RETAIL price – not what we paid for the item.
6. Their acceptance scans are almost 100%
7. Their email customer support as 7 days a week
8. They have pretty colours (I prefer blue to red)
9. their drivers dont threaten my business with strike action
10. their business collection service is now very reliable
11. They can collect far later than their competitors
12. The local depot has a vending machine with real coke. not Coke Zero, or coke blah…. but real full sugar coke. awesome.
I am running out of ideas
13. All the drivers who come to us speak English as their second language
14. The local driver always laughs at my jokes
15. their back office does not go down as much as RM click and collect.
thats all I can think of……..