People sending items abroad with Royal Mail have been warned there is no end to the disruption in sight after the company was hit by a “cyber incident” on Thursday.
The company is still unable to send letters and parcels abroad and says it is working “hard” to fix the problem.
There are also slight delays in UK postal delivery, but domestic deliveries are unaffected.
Royal Mail apologized again and promised to update people as soon as possible.
Some customers who had already sent shipments abroad before the “incident” could experience delays, it said.
The company is calling it a “cyber incident” rather than a cyber attack because it doesn’t yet know what caused the problem, the BBC has been told.
A spokesman for the National Crime Agency said he was “aware of an incident affecting Royal Mail” and was working with the National Cyber Security Center – which is part of the UK’s cyber intelligence agency GCHQ – to investigate its understand impact.
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The affected back office system is used by Royal Mail to prepare mail for dispatch abroad and to track and trace overseas shipments.
It operates at six locations, including Royal Mail’s massive Heathrow distribution center in Slough, as well as its Bristol location, both of which do not pass through mail.
In the year to March, Royal Mail sent 152 million parcels internationally, equivalent to around 200,000 items per day.
However, this was only a small fraction of the number of packages sent domestically.
Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford University and former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, told the BBC he believed the “incident” was due to “malicious activity”.
He suggested, based on the limited information available on the case so far, that it was likely a case of criminal extortion or a “ransomware” attack.
“You are locked out of the system and there will be a demand, probably in broken English from criminals abroad, to pay lots of money in cryptocurrency for what is called a decryption key to let you back into the system,” he told the Today newspaper Program.
Whatever happened, a full recovery will likely take time, Prof Martin added.
Royal Mail has faced a series of hurdles in recent months, including mounting losses as people send fewer letters and delivery delays as postal workers go on strike over wages and conditions.
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