The Royal Mail, the UK’s main mail delivery service, has halted its international shipping services due to a “serious service disruption” caused by what it described as a “computer incident”.

Although delivery and collection services across the UK have not been affected by the incident, the company has advised customers to suspend export deadlines while the issues are resolved as they cannot not be shipped to overseas destinations.

“The incident was detected yesterday, UK/domestic mail not affected,” a Royal Mail spokesperson told BleepingComputer when we asked for more details earlier today.

In a separate statement, Royal Mail said items already delivered could experience delays and added that Parcelforce Worldwide services had not been interrupted.

“Our import operations continue to provide full service, with some minor delays. Parcelforce Worldwide export services are still operating to all international destinations, although customers should expect one-to-one delays. two days.” said Royal Mail.

Although Royal Mail has yet to reveal the true nature of the incident, it said it had engaged outside experts for an ongoing investigation and reported it to UK security agencies.

“We immediately launched an investigation into the incident and are working with external experts. We have reported the incident to our regulators and relevant safety authorities.”

We are experiencing disruptions to our international export services and are temporarily unable to ship items to overseas destinations.

We urge customers to keep all export items while we work to resolve the issue.

Sorry for any disruption this may cause.

— Royal Mail (@RoyalMail) January 11, 2023

A spokesperson for the UK’s National Cyber ​​Security Center (NCSC) said that the NCSC is “aware of an incident affecting Royal Mail Group Ltd and is working with the company, alongside the National Crime Agency, to fully understand the impact”.

“Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this disruption and we will update you as soon as we have more information,” Royal Mail also added. said Wednesday.

Today’s incident follows a Shutdown in November 2022 which led to Royal Mail’s tracking services being unavailable for over 24 hours.

The outage affected the Track and Trace website, with UK residents only able to track their parcel, letter and mail deliveries through the Royal Mail app.

BleepingComputer has also found that the Royal Mail Click & Drop website is experiencing payment issues regardless of payment method (credit card, debit card, PayPal) or number of attempted transactions.

This prevented Royal Mail customers from printing home postage labels as they could not make payments online.

These recurring IT problems come at a time when the mail delivery giant’s services are already strained amid negotiations with the Communication Workers Union and national strikes planned.