UK Post Office has a computer glitch

THE UK POSTAL SERVICE is having a wave of computer problems that could lead to a potential nightmare situation over the busy Christmas season.

A number of branches throughout the country experienced a severe computer glitch that affected most services, including mail delivery and payments.

The problems occured over two 30-minute periods on Monday, affecting a number of transactions and leading to long queues.

This is the latest in a series of issues affecting postal services in the UK, with the Royal Mail web site suffering outages since the beginning of this month. Some of these problems even resulted in people being charged twice while using Smartstamp. The online Price Finder service has also been down since 21 November.

The Post Office said these latest problems were unrelated and that it had restored its service to 11,800 branches. It also apologised for the fault.

"We are very sorry for the inconvenience this problem has caused customers. We know how important the Post Office is to our customers at all times, but especially at Christmas," said Kevin Gilliland, network and sales director for the Post Office, according to the BBC.

The downtime could not have come at a worse time, as millions of people rely on the postal service to deliver presents and Christmas cards, in addition to many people receiving their welfare and pension payments there.

Monday was also the deadline for sending mail overseas, with today being the final deadline for standard packages if people want to ensure delivery in time for Christmas. The timing of the computer glitch therefore could not have been worse and might have even been caused by an overload on the system.

With less than two weeks to go until Christmas and the possibility of further Post Office mayhem, things could get tough for a lot of people in the UK. µ