Yesterday saw more misery for online sellers wanting to post packages, with Royal Mail plagued with Click and Drop issues saw a third failure within 7 days. Having seen issues with their Amazon connection on Tuesday and Friday (which they have said appears to have been an issue at Amazon’s end), on Monday this week they were offline for the entire day.
Shortly before 9am, they were investigating a Click and Drop issues where orders are showing the incorrect status with the announcement that the service would be ‘briefly’ placed into maintenance mode while they investigated. This turned into an all day affair with full service not resumed until gone 9pm at night.
The full timeline is below, and whilst emergency manifesting may have worked for some, anyone with significant numbers of orders to send simply would have had time to create and print labels manually and these Click and Drop issues would have been a major problem.
We’re hoping that this is the last of the Click and Drop issues for a while – as the old saying goes, these things come in threes.
Investigating Sep 06, 2021 – 08:57 BST
We are currently investigating an issue where orders are showing the incorrect status.
We are investigating this with the highest priority and will regularly update this status page with any additional information
While we investigate Click and Drop is briefly being placed into maintenance mode.Identified Sep 06, 2021 – 10:21 BST
We are still investigating the issue affecting order statuses. We are treating this with the highest priority, but we have to keep the website in maintenance mode while the fix is implemented.
We will let you know as soon as we are able to disable maintenance mode on the website. There’s no immediate ETA yet but we’re hoping this can be as soon as possible.
Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused.Update Sep 06, 2021 – 11:49 BST
We are still working as hard as we can on the fix for the critical system issue identified this morning. We have to keep the site in maintenance mode until the fix is put in. More updates to follow. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused.
Update Sep 06, 2021 – 12:56 BST
We’re still working on fixing the issue affecting Click & Drop. We’re hoping for the site to be back operational as soon as possible.
We’ll post further updates as soon as we have them.Update Sep 06, 2021 – 14:14 BST
Our team is continuing to investigate the root cause of the issue and we apologise for the disruption that this outage has caused for you and your customers.
We have been working to bring the application back and we are preparing to restore access to Click & Drop.
We have identified the cause of the issue where orders were showing as the wrong status and this has now been rectified.
Unfortunately, your shipping rules may have been set as inactive and you will need to go to the shipping rules page and ensure any rules you expect to be operating are correctly enabled.
This means that you may have some orders where the shipping rules won’t have applied and for these you will have to manually apply postage.Manifesting is currently disabled and will be re-enabled later this afternoon.
You can use a manual Emergency Manifest if your pickup or drop-off is before the manifesting process is re-enabled
https://clickanddrop.blob.core.windows.net/oba/click-and-drop-emergency-manifest.pdfAgain, we’re sorry for the disruption this is causing you
Monitoring Sep 06, 2021 – 15:03 BST
Access to the site has now been restored
As mentioned in the earlier update, your shipping rules may have been set as inactive and you will need to go to the shipping rules page and ensure any rules you expect to be operating are correctly enabled. This means that you may have some orders where the shipping rules won’t have applied and for these you will have to manually apply postage.
Manifesting is currently disabled and will be re-enabled later this afternoon.
You can use a manual Emergency Manifest if your pickup or drop-off is before the manifesting process is re-enabled https://clickanddrop.blob.core.windows.net/oba/click-and-drop-emergency-manifest.pdfUpdate Sep 06, 2021 – 16:08 BST
We are seeing an elevated number of errors and the team are currently investigating to add more capacity to the system
Update Sep 06, 2021 – 20:04 BST
We are seeing far fewer errors affecting the Click & Drop environment, but we are still continuing to work on some issues before we re-enable manifesting.
We’ll continue to provide more updates as soon as we are able.Update Sep 06, 2021 – 20:47 BST
Manifesting has now been enabled for OBA customers
Update Sep 06, 2021 – 21:08 BST
All functionality has now been enabled and the team will be monitoring overnight.
Again we are sorry for the disruption you have seen today.
– Royal Mail
7 Responses
Had to do an emergency manifest. now I’m worried that 1) the weekend’s packages will go astray 2) I’ll get a penalty from revenue protection as I’ve had to delete the orders I sent from click and drop to prevent them from manifesting again today… It’s likely to be a small amount of money but the amount of time it ate up yesterday combined with the dread I have about future shenangans is very frustrating.
I think royal mail really let themselves down with comms over this. They didn’t spread the news around their own network so many postal workers were confused when presented with unfamiliar paperwork or no paperwork. They never really told anyone whAt to do either. Switching on manfesting just before 9pm without any back up instructions about how to follow up using an emergency manifest. I’ve deleted all the orders that were emergency manifested yesterday, only to receive an automated warning that I could face a penalty…
I had to use old-school OBA and RM charged me an extra 5p per item for ‘non-barcoded mail’.
I’d advise everyone to have a back-up in place, like buy a big wodge of stamps. Just don’t buy them on eBay as they’ll probably be the new Chinese fakes.
RM in full action… “working hard to resolve” this issue. Problem started just before 9am and was “resolved” about 3pm (home time!). Did they hear about software rollback(s)?? I’m not sure they even have an IT dep over there. Shenanigans.
Our collection driver had nothing to collect and was surprised(?) by this fact. Majority of our post is Large Letter and it’s a PITA there’s no competition for RM in this area.
We’ve had it outages before, but it’s only ever been a few hours, not a whole day. I hope they learn from this.
I waited till the last just about the last post, could not even get logged on all I got was the RMG logo.
At cost of course it has all been upgraded to 24 today.
It is always a Monday with this but that was the worst I have ever seen.
its disgrace they are quick to fine you !
f*k*Rs dont even bother to have a on call IT team
I don’t get their insistence on people using Click and Drop via a 3rd party API that hooks into their own 1st party API. What’s wrong with just allowing us to use their API? I’m currently stuck with Easypost – a company in the USA with tech support that doesn’t start until 5pm.