Royal Mail Apologises After Hours-Long Digital Outage

Royal Mail has apologised for disruption to its online services over the holiday period.

Users reported that the Royal Mail app and website were unavailable for more than four hours on Wednesday, 28 December, the first day of regular post after strikes and bank holidays over the Christmas period.

Thousands of people reported to tracking website Down Detector that they were unable to access the services.

The website presented users with the message, “Our website is temporarily unavailable.”

Service outage

The reports began at about 9 p.m. on 27 December and continued into the morning of the following day.

“We are very sorry for the difficulties experienced by some customers when using our website today,” the company said in a prepared statement at the time.

“We are working to resolve this technical issue as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

The incident follows the failure of Royal Mail’s online tracking services over a period of more than 24 hours on 11 November.

Data glitch

The company at the time acknowledged a “technical issue” with the website, but said customers could use the Royal Mail app to track items.

Users also experienced problems printing postage from home via the Click & Drop website on Wednesday, 2 November.

Following that issue Royal Mail said the glitch had allowed a “limited number” of users to see information about other customers’ orders.

The company said the issue was related to a “technical problem” and was not caused by a cyber-attack.