Post Office branches across the country could not conduct business at opening time today after a major outage in the controversial Horizon IT system.
Thousands of branches were unable to trade at the busiest time of the day. The Post Office downplayed the issue – a spokesman told Computer Weekly: “The issue impacted some branches and was resolved at 9.30am. All the branches that were impacted are trading as per normal.”
But a notice sent to subpostmasters suggested that “some” added up to thousands. The notice said: “We are currently aware of an issue affecting approx 3000 counters unable to connect to Horizon and trade. Technical teams believe that the issue has been identified and are working to bring connectivity back to branches as quickly as possible to allow trading.”
Sheffield subpostmaster Richard Trinder, a representative at the Voice of the Postmaster campaign group, said: “Forty minutes of explaining to customers that the Post Office computer system wasn’t working this morning. You can imagine the replies.”
Mark Baker, subpostmaster representative at the Communication Workers Union, said he believes the outage was nationwide. “They seemed to fix it pretty quickly, but I expect more of this type of incident. It’s happening all the time and until they replace the collapsing system it will happen more and more.” He said he believed it to be an issue related to what he termed the “Horizon gateway”.
The Post Office is in the midst of an IT crisis as it attempts to replace the Horizon system, which has been at the centre of a major scandal that saw thousands of lives ruined. Many lost their livelihoods and about 900 were wrongly convicted of financial crimes based on data from the error-prone system used by about 12,000 branches.
A project to replace Horizon was due to be completed in 2025, but will now not be fully in place until 2030. Supplier Fujitsu is likely to receive another five-year contract worth up to £180m to continue support for Horizon.
Last week the Post Office announced it is bringing in a new technology leader as it awaits nearly £1bn additional government funding for the troubled project.
The organisation’s chief transformation officer, Chris Brocklesby, is leaving on 6 September at the end of his one-year contract, and will be succeeded on an interim basis by Andy Nice, formerly transformation director at Camelot, the company that ran the National Lottery until January 2024. Nice starts on 23 August.
The Post Office’s current interim chair, Nigel Railton, was previously chief executive of Camelot.
Separately, Computer Weekly has been told that negotiations between Fujitsu and the Post Office are ongoing, with a potential new contract reaching the authorisation stage at senior levels of Fujitsu. When asked for more details by Computer Weekly, Fujitsu said: “[It] will not be sharing anything on this”.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters, including Alan Bates, and the problems they suffered due to accounting software. It’s one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal, since 2009).
Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal
Also watch: ITV’s documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story