Royal Mail Click & Drop crashed in spectacular fashion this Tuesday afternoon. In addition to not working and then being taken off line, reports are piling in both by phone and on social media of sellers who can’t see their own orders but can see those of other sellers.
It’s amazingly bad timing, first you can’t ship anything because there are strikes, then you can ship as the strikes are called off but with Click & Drop crashed you can’t buy the labels.
One seller in a Facebook group (image above) commented that one of their competitors sales were ‘absolutely amazing’… a little bit of jealousy there maybe, but seriously a data breach like this is the last thing Royal Mail need on top of their £219 million losses over the past six months.
Another seller of party supplies rang me to say they could see a load of car parts waiting to be shipped, needless to say they couldn’t actually see their own orders so that they could print labels.
It’s not yet known if the data breach is serious enough to warrant Royal Mail reporting themselves to the Information Commissioner. They’ve probably got enough problems not only trying to restore their systems to something that works but also one might surmise that they’ll have massive problems trying to rescue data and decide who needs to be billed what. With data from sellers appearing in other sellers Click & Drop accounts who knows what mess things are in.
We’ll wait to see if data can be recovered, if invoices are correctly generated or if you did manage to post orders today if your labels end up invalid as they’ve been lost in the system (That won’t be fun if they’ve already been collected). Equally customers won’t want to be overcharged for labels they didn’t print and use and especially they won’t want to be charged postage for orders that ended up visible on their account but belonged to another seller.
Click & Drop crashed – Royal Mail updates
Update – Our engineers are still working to restore the Click & Drop website.
We sincerely apologise for the continued inconvenience.
Nov 01, 2022 – 16:36 GMT
Update – Royal Mail has temporarily suspended its Click and Drop website as a precautionary measure following reports that a limited number of customers were able to see information about other customers’ orders following a technical problem. We are investigating the incident in order to fix the IT issue so that you can post as soon as possible.
If you have generated/printed your labels already:
In the meantime, customers can use paperwork to hand over their items. You can find the paperwork here https://clickanddrop.blob.core.windows.net/oba/click-and-drop-emergency-manifest.pdf
When Click & Drop is restored customers can manifest to ensure they are billed correctly
If you have not generated/printed your labels already, please wait for Click & Drop to be back online in order to post your items.
We again apologise for any inconvenience and will keep you updated.
Nov 01, 2022 – 15:59 GMT
Update – We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue, and we still hope to have the site back online as soon as possible.
If you are an OBA customer, you may need to use an emergency manifest form to hand over your post. A form can be found here: https://clickanddrop.blob.core.windows.net/oba/click-and-drop-emergency-manifest.pdf
We apologise for the inconvenience
Nov 01, 2022 – 15:24 GMT
Update – The Click & Drop website is still temporarily disabled while our engineers work to fix the issue.
We are aiming to have the site back and operational as soon as possible.
We apologise for the ongoing inconvenience.
Nov 01, 2022 – 15:02 GMT
Update – Our engineers are still working hard to resolve this issue. We plan to have the website operational again as soon as possible.
We are treating this as the highest priority.
Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused.
Nov 01, 2022 – 14:42 GMT
Update – We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.
Nov 01, 2022 – 14:01 GMT
Identified – We have been made aware there was an issue affecting Click & Drop that meant some customers could see other customer’s orders.
As a protective measure, we have stopped access to Click & Drop temporarily.
We fully understand and apologise for the inconvenience caused by this. Our engineers are working as hard as possible to get the site back up and running as expected.
Further updates will be posted here as soon as we have more information.
Nov 01, 2022 – 13:57 GMT
Update – Our team are continuing to investigate the issue – we’re treating it as the highest priority.
Nov 01, 2022 – 13:44 GMT
Update – We are continuing to investigate this issue.
Nov 01, 2022 – 13:03 GMT
Investigating – We are investigating the issue.
Nov 01, 2022 – 13:03 GMT
One Response
Smells like sabotage to me. Disgruntled employees unhappy about the strikes being called off, perhaps? Otherwise it’s awfully coincidental. But silver linings… because Ebay have hobbled my business, I had ZERO orders to ship out today!