Having seen problems with Click & Drop on Friday, the Royal Mail tracking website has fallen over this Tuesday.
Currently if you visit the Royal Mail Tracking website you’ll be greeted with a message saying “Website temporarily unavailable. We’re sorry our website is temporarily unavailable. We are working on fixing the problem. Thank you for your patience.”
Thankfully, at the moment, the Royal Mail Click & Drop solution appears to be working and so far as we can tell it’s just the Royal Mail tracking website that has fallen over. This does mean that both consumers and retailers will be unable to track the status of their parcels. We’re unsure whether this impacts API customers such as eBay to enable them to retrieve on-time delivery status information.
Tracking is obviously important if you have customers asking where their parcels are, especially seeing as you and they have paid for the service, so it may be worth notifying your customer service team that updates are currently impossible to access. They may also experience higher than normal numbers of service calls if consumers are trying to use the Royal Mail tracking website themselves.
If you spot any other issues with the Royal Mail website let us know. Doubtless it is horribly complex and built up of many sections and so will be a nightmare to maintain and 100% uptime is probably an impossible goal.
16.30pm Updated to add:
The Royal Mail tracking website appears to be back up and running. However the item that was due for delivery to me today hasn’t had a tracking update since 3.38am this morning and hasn’t been delivered. It is possible that Royal Mail may have had more problems today than just their website being down or my delivery could have been a one off blip and everyone else got great service. If you have a load of items which should have been delivered today but weren’t let us know.
One Response
The @RoyalMailHelp twitter account is revealing (and worrying) – a number of people have noticed that their tracked items are not being delivered full stop; instead, they are stuck in limbo. Either the parcels are being backlogged for some reason, or something has happened at a RM fulfilment centre which isn’t being reported.