Royal Mail Still Not Accepting Parcels for Export

Royal Mail’s cyber incident that has caused it to not accept international letters and parcels continues to affect small businesses.

However, there is some early good news as the organization announced it is trialing an operational workaround that it hopes will enable it to clear its backlog.

“Following the recent cyber incident, we are trialing operational workarounds and have started moving limited volumes of export parcels,” the company said in a statement.

But that doesn’t mean customers can start sending new packages as Royal Mail continues to ask that shippers not send international parcels yet.

“While we trial these operational workarounds, we continue to ask customers not to submit any new export parcels into the network. Our initial focus will be to clear mail that has already been processed and is waiting to be dispatched.

Royal Mail started accepting international letters again that do not require a customs declaration, “We are pleased to announce that we have resumed the export of letters which do not require a customs declaration to all international destinations.”

Royal Mail reiterated that inbound international shipments, letters and parcels, as well as all domestic shipments, are not affected by this cyber incident.

“Our import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays. Domestic services remain unaffected.”

Royal Mail Ransomware Attack

While Royal Mail has said very little about its cyber incident, it had revealed it’s dealing with a ransomware attack. Reports suggest the organization was hit by an affiliate of the notorious Russian-based hacker group LockBit.

But what remains unclear, and Royal Mail said it is not releasing those details as it was advised it may be detrimental to its efforts to solve this crisis, what the hacker is demanding.

Typically in such attacks, hackers provide proof they have access to sensitive data through an exploit or have taken down a system completely, and demand payment in a cryptocurrency to “release” the system or provide information on how they hacked the system.

This incident has turned into one of the most serious incidents of late as it has completely shut down a major operational segment of the UK’s mail system, impacting many small business sellers that rely on Royal Mail to service their international clients.