We received the following bulletin from Royal Mail with regards to their on-going cyber incident yesterday afternoon (30th January). It seems that Royal Mail in collaboration with UK authorities including the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre, have been working around the clock to find a work around after the Royal Mail cyber incident first reported on the 12th January.

Royal Mail Cyber Incident

Progress has been made, here is the full statement from Royal Mail:

Everything Dinosaur

We at Everything Dinosaur can confirm that last night and this morning we have started to despatch international parcels with a tracked or tracked and signed service or just the signed for service. By 3.30pm GMT (31st of January), all parcels that were held and had tracked, tracked/signed or just signed shipping have been sent out.

Where we have been able to upgrade standard airmail parcels, we have and these have been sent out as well. This just leaves those standard airmail parcels that we were not able to upgrade being delayed by this current cyber incident.

We thank all those customers who have been affected by this for their patience.

At this difficult time, we would like to assure all our customers that we continue to implement contingency plans to minimise any delays to the despatch of parcels.

Please note, international customers based in the EU are not affected, our deliveries to EU customers have continued to operate as normal as Everything Dinosaur uses a different courier network for parcel deliveries to the European Union.

For further information and to contact Everything Dinosaur: Email Everything Dinosaur.

In Summary

• International tracked parcels can now be despatched.
• International tracked and signed parcels can now be despatched.
• International signed parcels can now be despatched.
• A significant proportion of those Everything Dinosaur customers who had purchased an item and paid for standard international airmail shipping have had their parcels upgraded free of charge to a tracked and/or signed service to permit their order to be sent out.
• Only international standard airmail parcels are currently being held and cannot be despatched.

Visit Everything Dinosaur’s award-winning website: Everything Dinosaur.

Following on from yesterday’s blog post about the international cyber incident at Royal Mail team members can provide an update.

At 10:16am (GMT) on the 26th January, Everything Dinosaur received the following statement from the Managing Director of Royal Mail International, Antony Harvey.

International Cyber Incident

The cyber incident, believed to be a ransom ware attack was reported on 12th January (2023), Everything Dinosaur has been unable to send out certain parcels to its international customers, however, customers in the European Union have been unaffected.

Royal Mail has been making progress and implementing measures to mitigate the damage to their networks caused by this attack.

In summary, this is what this latest bulletin means for Everything Dinosaur customers:

• International Tracked & Signed service as well as the International Signed service parcels can now be despatched.
• Delivery likely to take longer than usual.
• Customers may notice a different tracking information as items leave the UK.
• We have been asked not to submit any new Tracked or Standard International Airmail parcels into the network for the moment.

Further updates on the Tracked and Standard International Airmail services will be provided in the coming days.

A spokesperson from Everything Dinosaur commented:

“We continue to do our best to inform our customers about the current difficulties at Royal Mail. Contingency plans have been put into operation to allow us to continue to despatch parcels overseas, however, for a small number of our customers, parcels have been delayed to permit Royal Mail to resolve this problem. We hope to send out all these parcels in the very near future and we would like to apologise to our customers for any delay in delivery.”

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The Latest Update on the Royal Mail Cyber Incident (Wednesday 25th January)

Royal Mail has released a statement about its progress as it attempts to find a work around following the cyber incident, believed to be a malicious ransom ware attack.

Update from Royal Mail

Here is the Royal Mail update”

“Royal Mail has resumed the export of parcels from Northern Ireland to Ireland. This builds on the recent move to resume the export of international letters to all international destinations. Customers in Northern Ireland can now export parcels bound for Ireland into Northern Ireland Post Office branches. Online customers will be able to print labels on Royal Mail shipping systems from 7pm, Friday 20 January. These services are currently only available for customers based in Northern Ireland. They are not available for customers based in Great Britain where export restrictions continue to apply.”

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The update from Royal Mail added:

“We have now resumed international export despatches for all mail streams including parcels and letters across a growing number of international destinations. We are making good progress in despatching items that are already in our network across all of our services. Please note you may see less tracking information than usual as we continue to restore our services. At this time, we continue to ask customers not to submit new parcels for export, and we will update further on service resumption as soon as possible.”

Mitigating the Impact

In addition, Royal Mail has released the following statement about their on-going work to resolve this issue:

“Royal Mail continues to work with external experts, the security authorities and regulators to mitigate the impact of this cyber incident, with a focus on restoring all services for export letters and parcels. Our import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays. Domestic services remain unaffected.”

The Impact on Everything Dinosaur

Everything Dinosaur would like to assure its customers that only a small portion of their international orders have been affected by this issue. All deliveries to customers in the European Union are unaffected. Everything Dinosaur uses a separate and distinct delivery company for customers in the EU, part of our strategy to offer more customer choice and to reduce dependence on one single supplier.

Customers in North America, South America and Australasia have had their parcels sent by an alternative courier wherever possible, however, a small number of orders have had to be held back and they cannot be sent out until Royal Mail opens up the international mail routes such as airmail and tracked and signed.

A spokesperson for the UK-based, award-winning mail order company apologised to that small proportion of customers that had been affected and stated:

“We are sorry for any delays that have been caused due to the problems at Royal Mail. We want to assure the small number of our customers that have been affected that as soon as we have permission to resume despatch of parcels to Royal Mail we will do so and we have put extra resources on standby to ensure we send out parcels as quickly as possible.”

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

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