Hacked!

Not us, fortunately, but it appears that the Royal Mail have been hit by a cyber attack that has severely affected their ability to ship parcels overseas. The current advice is not to send any new packages until the situation is resolved, and any that are already in the system could be delayed. It also seems to have knocked out any tracking details, so we can’t even find out where parcels have got to.

More details here: BBC News – Royal Mail hit by Russia-linked ransomware attack

For the moment we’re going to follow the advice and not send any more overseas parcels by Royal Mail until things sort themselves out – we’ll try to contact everyone affected. If you’re waiting for something from us that’s already been despatched, you may have to be patient. And this of course is on top of the backlog caused by the industrial action before Christmas.

We will still get orders packed and ready to go, so as soon as the issue is sorted we’ll be able to get them posted.

It doesn’t affect orders to the EU as we use a different carrier for these. Unfortunately for small and medium parcels there are no viable alternatives to Royal Mail, UPS/FedEx/DHL etc are all too expensive for the sizes of package we send out.

For UK customers at least things are on the up, the mail system is on the way back to normal, so we’ll still be shipping those out as usual.

Just to round off this cheery bulletin of almost non-stop bad news, this week’s new release has been slightly delayed. The weather has been a bit rubbish so we haven’t been able to get the models finished and photographed for the website. The moulds etc are all ready to go, so given a patch of clear weather we can get them varnished, photos taken and have them on the website early next week.