Cyberattack halts Royal Mail's overseas post

If you’re looking to send letters or parcels outside of the UK using Royal Mail, you’ll want to hold off for a little while. Royal Mail is suffering from “severe disruption” after an unnamed cyber incident.

While no specifics are currently available, Royal Mail has disclosed enough to let us know that the disruption is very bad indeed.

The statement reads as follows:

"We are temporarily unable to despatch items to overseas destinations. We strongly recommend that you temporarily hold any export mail items while we work to resolve the issue. Items that have already been despatched may be subject to delays. We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers for any disruption this incident is causing.

Our import operations continue to perform a full service, with some minor delays. Parcelforce Worldwide export services are still operating to all international destinations though customers should expect delays of one to two days."

Hunting for clues

The attack is being investigated by third parties, but there’s no word currently with regard to how quickly the services will be back online. Royal Mail has told Bleeping Computer that domestic deliveries are unaffected, so for now people will just have to steer clear of anything overseas bound. This is of course a big problem for people selling items online, or simply sending items to friends and relatives.

Potentially more costly alternative solutions may have to be found until Royal Mail can get its services back up and running.

We will update this blog as more details are released.

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