Royal Mail sites hit by downtime cock-up

Someone's going to get the sack

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Director, 4th April 2008 12:06 GMT

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Royal Mail’s three main websites have been unavailable since last night, forcing millions of customers to get used to the taste of glue while guessing where their registered post might be.

Blighty’s national postal service currently has no online facility. Instead, customers attempting to gain web access to Royal Mail are greeted with a static status page about the downtime.

It reads: “Our website is temporarily unavailable. Full service should be resumed very soon. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

A number of frustrated readers have contacted El Reg about the massive system outage telling us that Royal Mail’s websites have been out of action since last night.

Services currently unavailable on royalmail.com, postoffice.co.uk and parcelforce.com include tracking and tracing special delivery parcels and registered mail, the ability to print out postage, and a facility to check postcodes.

We called Royal Mail to find out when its websites might come back to life and to also try and pin down what caused the cock-up.

A spokesman told us that Royal Mail tech bods are investigating the problem, but was extremely vague when asked to provide further details.

“We’re still trying to get some clarification on what’s gone wrong. If I could tell you more I would but I couldn’t possibly speculate without being in possession of all the facts,” he said.

Royal Mail is unable to update customers on when they can expect service to be resumed, said the spokesman. In the meantime there's always the telephone, he added. ®

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