Royal Mail ‘cyber attack’ stops post being sent abroad
ROYAL Mail was thrown into chaos yesterday after it was forced to stop sending post abroad because of a ‘cyber incident’.
The company said it was experiencing ‘severe disruption’ and asked customers to stop posting letters and parcels to other countries.
The apparent cyber attack struck yesterday afternoon and the main target appears to be Royal Mail’s Worldwide Distribution Centre – a massive warehouse the size of six football pitches – near Heathrow.
It is one of the most automated postal centres in Europe, with conveyor belts and processing equipment handling millions of letters and packages.
But the incident slammed the brakes on the hub’s fast-paced 24-hour operation, which exports up to 200,000 items a day.
Royal Mail said customers who had already sent items for postage abroad ‘may experience delay or disruption’, but its operations to import letters and parcels were still operating with only minor delays. A spokesman said: ‘Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this disruption and we will update customers as soon as we have more information.
‘We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers.’
Royal Mail was working alongside external experts to fix the problem, with around 200 people involved in the recovery effort. It is not yet known who is behind the cyber attack, but it could be the work of crime gangs who have previously targeted the NHS and companies including The Guardian newspaper.
There is also speculation they could be linked to Russia.
Meanwhile, the Government’s National Cyber Security Centre said it was ‘aware’ of the incident and was working with Royal Mail and the National Crime Agency to ‘fully understand the impact’.
Royal Mail did not give a timeline for when operations would be back up and running, with some predicting the disruption could last up to a week.
Paul Holland, of cyber security firm Beyond Encryption, said the attack appeared to have targeted Royal Mail’s ‘core back-end systems’, which are used to manage orders and the processing of parcels and letters. Other delivery businesses owned by Royal Mail’s parent company International Distributions Services, including Parcelforce and GLS, are understood to be operating as normal.
Royal Mail last month suffered a dismal Christmas as strike action by workers left letters and parcels piling up in sorting offices.
The operation, which was set up 507 years ago by Henry VIII, has been rocked over the last 12 months by declining letter numbers, the end of the pandemic boom in parcel deliveries and a bitter industrial dispute with the Communication Workers Union, which represents 115,000 postal workers.
The dispute is focused on plans by IDS to change the business to make it more competitive with rival delivery firms such as Amazon and Evri. But the CWU claims staff will be turned into ‘gig economy’ workers with less reliable hours and pay.
The problems have left the company facing huge losses and cast doubt over the future. Chief executive Simon Thompson told staff last month that bosses were ‘fighting for the life of this business’.