Royal Mail system suffering major problems leaving people unable to post packages

Royal Mail’s system has been hit by a major problem, leaving people unable to properly send out their post.

The company said it was aware of a “critical system issue” that was affecting its Click and Drop service, its primary shipping option that, for example, allows businesses to book and send out items to customers.

The issues have been ongoing for hours, leading to a host of complaints from customers who said they would probably be left with extensive backlogs.

Royal Mail said that the problem had initially been caused when orders would show the wrong status. It was investigating it “with the highest priority”, it said, but it had been forced to put the Click and Drop service into “maintenance mode”.

That would only happen “briefly”, it said, but at the time of publication the maintanence mode had been in effect for six hours.

On Twitter, users complained that they would much rather see incorrect order statuses than use the site at all.

Others said they were now stuck with significant backlogs – including orders that had been made over the weekend – that would probably have to wait until Tuesday to be posted.

Royal Mail said that it was “hoping for the site to be operational as soon as possible” but that it was unable to give an expected time when the problems would be fixed.

Anyone attempting to use the site during the outage was shown error messages indicating that the site was being maintained and was temporarily down.

In the meantime, it directed customers to its “Emergency Manifest” service, which allows people to order deliveries in the event of critical problems. It advised people to use that if they were to have pickup or drop-offs that were due to happen before the outage is resolved.