Post Office services restored

Computer crash affecting Post Office services nationwide, including Newbury, has been resolved

A COMPUTER crash affecting Post Office services across the country yesterday (Monday) - including Newbury's main office in Cheap Street - has been resolved.

The system failure affected post offices from lunchtime on one of the busiest days of the year for Royal Mail and resulted in long queues for customers in Newbury, who were only able to make purchases in cash.

A spokeswoman for the Post Office, Val Bodden, said today that the service was restored across the network by late afternoon yesterday.

The computer problem left many of some 11,800 Post office branches across the country, including Newbury, without a full range of services, from buying a stamp, to obtaining car tax, for at least two 30 minute periods during the afternoon.

At the Cheap Street branch, clerks were reduced to manually calculating the cost of posting parcels, before sticking numerous individual stamps on parcels to make up the cost, with cash only payments accepted, resulting in delays at the counter.

Kevin Gilliland, the Post Office's network and sales director, said: “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.”

The Post Office has refused to confirm whether huge numbers of online Christmas shoppers making demands on the Post Office's national computer system, Horizon, caused it to crash, a problem which also prevented Post Office account holders from accessing their savings.

The Post Office was expecting to handle 130 million letters and parcels yesterday - about twice the norm.