Royal Mail strikes may have been called off for a short period, but troubles at Royal Mail continue with their tracking broken this morning. Anyone trying to check on their delivery this morning will find the tracking offline.
Service temporarily unavailable
We’re sorry our service is temporarily unavailable. We are working on fixing the problem.
Thank you for your patience.
– Royal Mail Tracking broken message on website
It’s hard not to feel slightly sorry for Royal Mail, but even more sympathy has to go to their customers. With strikes, massive financial losses, Click & Drop crashing with a data breach and now Tracking broken they’re really not in a stable position currently.
Royal Mail haven’t revealed to the public what is going on with their technology. I’ve heard scurrilous rumours that their tech issues might be related to strikes or even sabotage, but that’s just conspiracy theory for those with too much time on their hands. More serious people are asking questions as to how robust their systems are.
The Click & Drop data breach simply shouldn’t be able to occur with a robust technology platform. Data should be held securely and if the system crashes you might not be able to see your own data but there is no way another customers data should be served to you – imagine if your bank crashed and suddenly I could see your bank transactions? The only conclusion you can infer from the data breach is that the software systems aren’t robust and need a total overhaul.
Today with Tracking broken, it might be a simply internal API connection to the consumer facing website that’s broken, or it might be something more serious that’s gone wrong on the back end. Regardless it just adds to the lack of confidence that Royal Mail can be trusted with your parcels – if it’s not tech that breaks again next week then it’ll be strikes over Black Friday week and in the run up to Christmas.
Confidence in a service is easy to lose but much much harder to regain. It’s time for agreement to be reached, strikes put to bed, and for Royal Mail to set out to their customers how they will move forward and what service retailers can expect to be able to offer their customers in the future.
2 Responses
As people have reiterated over the years.
Never have all your eggs in one basket and always have a back up plan JUST IN CASE.
this is still down, today 14th Nov
nightmare for customers and our metrics are likely to take a big hit as nothing shows as “delivered” on the marketplaces.