Royal Mail has told customers sending parcels abroad it is facing ‘severe service disruption’ due to a cyber incident. A statement said it was temporarily unable to despatch export items including letters and parcels to overseas destinations.

Royal Mail said: ‘We have asked customers temporarily to stop submitting any export items into the network while we work hard to resolve the issue. ‘Some customers may experience delay or disruption to items already shipped for export.

‘Our import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays. ‘Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this disruption and we will update customers as soon as we have more information.

‘We immediately launched an investigation into the incident and we are working with external experts. ‘We have reported the incident to our regulators and the relevant security authorities. ‘We would like to sincerely apologize to impacted customers for any disruption this incident may be causing.’ The firm is temporarily advising customers to hold any export mail while it attempts to resolve the issue.

Royal Mail added that it had launched an investigation into the incident, was ‘working with external experts’ and ‘sincerely apologized’ to customers for the disruption. Their import services remain operational but are experiencing minor delays. It comes after a system failure caused all flights in the US to be grounded earlier today. Passengers were left stranded at airports across the globe as they await further news. (SOURCE)