Royal Mail services hit by major cyber attack

The UK’s Royal Mail has been compelled to droop abroad services amid critical disruption precipitated by a cyber attack of an as-yet unspecified nature.

The attack has hit its worldwide export services and means it’s presently unable to dispatch letters or parcels exterior the UK. Computer Weekly understands that home services are unaffected.

“Royal Mail is experiencing severe service disruption to our international export services following a cyber incident,” stated a spokesperson.

“We are briefly unable to despatch export objects together with letters and parcels to abroad locations. We have requested clients briefly to cease submitting any export objects into the community whereas we work exhausting to resolve the difficulty. Some clients could expertise delay or disruption to objects already shipped for export. Our import operations proceed to carry out a full service with some minor delays.

“Our groups are working across the clock to resolve this disruption and we’ll replace clients as quickly as we’ve extra info. We instantly launched an investigation into the incident and we’re working with exterior consultants. We have reported the incident to our regulators and the related safety authorities.

“We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers for any disruption this incident may be causing,” the Royal Mail spokesperson stated.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) confirmed via Twitter that it’s offering help. “We are aware of an incident affecting Royal Mail Group Ltd and are working with the company, alongside the National Crime Agency, to fully understand the impact,” stated an NCSC spokesperson.

The cyber attack comes in the course of a tough interval for Royal Mail because it struggles with the influence of a collection of strikes by members of the Communications Workers Union (CWU), which precipitated important disruption in the run-up to Christmas 2022.

It is engaged in talks with the CWU by mediation service Acas, that are presently scheduled to conclude on Friday 20 January.

At the time of writing, no additional details about the exact nature of the incident had been made obtainable.