International Incident Bulletin

Last updated: 31st of January 2023

Welcome to our international incident bulletin; a roundup of any issues that may be impacting our parcel and letter services to and from countries around the world. We keep this information as up to date as possible, with information supplied to Royal Mail by the various foreign national postal authorities.

Service Update

We continue to make progress in exporting an increasing number of items to a growing number of international destinations. We are using alternative solutions and systems, which are not affected by the recent cyber incident.

Our focus has been on despatching the export parcels and letters which were in our network before the cyber incident. We have also been successfully despatching Standard (Untracked) export letters since reinstating those services for customers on 18 January and Tracked & Signed and Signed letters and parcels since 26 January.

As a result of this progress and the further growing capability of our alternative export solutions, we have resumed our International Tracked services to all destinations for business customers and consumers buying postage online. This includes parcel, large letter and letter formats of these services. Online shipping solutions have been enabled to allow customers to select these services, print labels and send items from 30 January. 

Delivery of International Tracked items posted from Monday 30 January may take slightly longer than usual and customers may notice slightly different tracking information as items leave the UK.  

At this time we are still unable to process new Royal Mail parcels purchased through Post Office branches. Customers can still access the following export services though Post Office branches:

• Sending export parcels through Parcelforce Worldwide
• Dropping off items they have labelled online
• Purchasing our International standard and economy letter format service.

We are working hard to resume more services through Post Office branches and will provide further updates on these services as soon as possible.

Summary of International services which have been reinstated:

• International Tracked
• International Tracked & Signed
• International Signed
• International Untracked (Standard / Economy) Letter services
• Customers in Northern Ireland are also able to submit both export letters and export parcels for all services bound for Ireland into the Royal Mail network through all channels. These services are currently only available for customers based in Northern Ireland.

Delivery of International items may take slightly longer than usual and customers using Tracked services may notice different tracking information as items leave the UK. 

We continue to ask customers not to submit any Untracked (Standard/Economy) export parcels into our network just yet. We are aiming to provide further updates on these services as soon as possible.

Import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays. Domestic services are unaffected.

We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers for the disruption this incident is causing. Our teams are continuing to work around the clock to reinstate remaining export services as quickly as we can.