Royal Mail, UK’s leading mail delivery service, has been experiencing ongoing outages with its online tracking services down for more than 24 hours at the time of writing.
With Royal Mail’s Track & Trace website offline, British residents are unable to track their parcels, letters and mail deliveries.
Royal Fail
BleepingComputer has been monitoring the ongoing outage at Royal Mail that has now exceeded 24 hours.
Track & Trace website visitors are met with a “Service temporarily unavailable” message, leaving them unable to track mail and parcel deliveries.
BleepingComputer observed, up until early morning hours of yesterday, the Track & Trace API was returning an HTTP 429 status code—indicative of too many requests received by the server.
We reached out to Royal Mail with critical questions, to better understand if this was a result of a cyber incident or a DDoS attack in progress.
“There is a technical issue with our Track and Trace website which means that customers are currently unable to track their items on the website,” a Royal Mail spokesperson told BleepingComputer.
“Customers are still able to track items on the Royal Mail app. We are working hard to fix this issue with our suppliers as quickly as we are able. We apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers.”
For tracking inquiries, customers can use the Royal Mail app or consider directly messaging the @RoyalMailHelp Twitter account with your item’s tracking information:
So that we can help further, please DM us any of the outstanding details below:
– Item tracking number, date of posting/collection & service used
– Sender and recipient’s full name, address, contact number and email address
– Any collection details if applicable (CC- ref)^RM
— Royal Mail Help (@RoyalMailHelp) November 11, 2022
Click & Drop issues
On Wednesday night, the Click & Drop website was also seen persistently experiencing payment issues—no matter what payment method was used (credit card, debit card, PayPal) and how many times the transaction was attempted:
“Unfortunately we have been unable to complete your purchase – you have not been charged – please try again.”
The error message appeared in our tests despite the status page indicating all systems were operational.
Without being able to pay online, users would be left unable to print postage labels from home.
Last week, a customer data leak on the Click & Drop website, forced Royal Mail to temporarily shut down its online operations.
The mail delivery giant has to deal with these recurring IT issues at a time when services are already strained amid planned strikes. Although, the outage does not seem to be connected to the industrial action.
Update, Friday Nov 11th 11:11 AM ET: Added statement from Royal Mail.
Source: www.bleepingcomputer.com