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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 failure
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, such as if this is connected to a cyber attack or a DDoS attack in progress, and are waiting to hear back.
Royal Mail’s “IT team are aware” and working to resolve the issue:
We’re really sorry for any inconvenience. Our IT team are aware of an issue and they’re working to fix this ASAP. Please try again later. ^RM
— Royal Mail Help (@RoyalMailHelp) November 10, 2022
For urgent tracking inquiries, directly messaging the @RoyalMailHelp Twitter account with your item’s tracking information might help:
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.
