Royal Mail International recovery starts

Category: Operations
Royal Mail International recovery

The Royal Mail Cyber Incident, announced last Wednesday, has prevented the postal service from sending international post out of the country for a week now. It was confirmed by CEO Simon Thompson in a Parliament Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee meeting that the incident occurred a day before the public announcement and ever since the company has been working non stop on the Royal Mail International recovery.

Impacted services include:

  • Royal Mail International Tracked
  • Royal Mail International Tracked & Signed
  • Royal Mail International Signed
  • Royal Mail International Standard

Royal Mail International recovery – letters start to move

Royal Mail are now trialling operational workarounds and have started moving limited volumes of export mail parcels. While they trial these operational workarounds, they are continuing to ask customers not to submit any new export parcels into the network. The Royal Mail International recovery plan’s initial focus will be to clear mail that has already been processed and is waiting to be despatched.

However, Royal Mail have announced that they have resumed the export of letters to all international destinations. From 1900hrs yesterday evening (Wednesday the 18th of January), customers will be able to access international export letters services again via online shipping solutions, to print labels and send items which do not require a customs declaration.

Royal Mail International Business Standard and Royal Mail International Business Economy (untracked) personal correspondence items, can therefore be posted into the Royal Mail network through all channels, including Royal Mail post boxes and Post Office branches from today, Thursday the 19th of January.

NB You can only post letters which do not require a customs declaration, that is letters which do not contain goods. If you are an ecommerce seller despatching sales via International Letter post, then along with International Parcels you still can’t send via Royal Mail!

Royal Mail continues to work with external experts, the security authorities and regulators to mitigate the impact of this cyber incident, with a focus on restoring services for export letters and parcels.

Our import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays. Domestic services remain unaffected, and Parcelforce Worldwide export services are still operating to all international destinations.

We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers for any disruption this incident may be causing. Please be assured our teams are working around the clock to resolve this situation and we will update you as soon as we have more information.

– Royal Mail

5 Responses

  1. Too little, too late. Should have been fixed within 24 hours. Not good enough for a big and “trusted” company like this. No excuses.

  2. roll on the recovery, international post for letters / large letters is so expensive with others like UPS etc, we need it up again soonest. Hopefully with better security across all their divisions

  3. Two weeks later and still no resolution, surely they had back up images, this should have been a wipe and reimage, 2 weeks is shocking, furthermore to lead withthe carrot of “it’s nearly fixed” and then just drag it out further is a disgrace. The whole company is a disaster, the problem is that there are few alternatives for relatively low cost mail, we are looking elsewhere but it will cost us, maybe it will be worth it.

  4. Best check with your post office if you are intending to use Click & Drop. My PO have told me this morning that they have had no notification from Royal Mail so the instruction of no international mail that requires customs data still stands. P*ss ups and breweries comes to mind.

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