If your Vinted parcel is running days behind schedule, or your local InPost locker is bursting at the seams, you’re not imagining it.
Across the country this week, drivers are reporting full lockers, undelivered parcels, and a growing backlog that customers are only just starting to feel.
Sellers are being chased by buyers. Returns are stuck in limbo. Incoming deliveries are being redirected to alternative lockers further from home.
And it all traces back to a decision InPost made with two days’ notice.
What InPost Actually Did
On 16th April, drivers across the network were told that 230 Sunday routes would stop running from 19th April.
The justification, according to drivers who contacted us, was parcel volume data from a single Sunday in March.
One Sunday. One data point. 230 routes cut from the schedule.
No public announcement. No warning to customers. No list of affected areas published.
Why This Week Is When It Bites
This article is being written on Thursday 23rd April, and the effects started landing yesterday.
Here is why the timing matters.
When a parcel is collected from an InPost locker, it takes roughly two days to reach its destination depot for onward delivery.
On Sunday 19th April, 230 routes were not serviced. Parcels sat in lockers, uncollected.
On Monday 20th April, drivers on those cancelled routes came back to double the workload, collecting Sunday’s parcels alongside Monday’s normal volume.
Two days’ work for one day’s pay, as one driver put it.
That is when Sunday’s parcels finally entered the network.
Which means Wednesday 22nd April was the moment that backlog surge reached destination depots and started being loaded onto delivery vans.
That is exactly when our inbox started pinging with drivers reporting full lockers across multiple areas.
“They’re All Full”
The problem is simple when you see it.
On a normal day, a locker has a predictable mix of incoming deliveries to be dropped in and outgoing parcels to be collected.
This week, drivers are arriving at lockers carrying nearly double the volume of parcels to drop off, because they are delivering Wednesday’s normal volume plus Sunday’s backlog on top.
Many of those lockers were already running at or near capacity before any of this started.
They physically cannot absorb the extra volume.
As one driver told us: “Drivers reporting full lockers and parcels undelivered across multiple routes.”
He had been typing that message to us when the reports started coming in live.
The Numbers Are Eye-Watering
For argument’s sake, assume 500 parcels are left uncollected per route on a skipped Sunday.
Across 230 routes, that is 115,000 parcels feeding into the system two days late.
Those 115,000 parcels then hit destination depots mid-week, on top of normal volume.
The result is what customers are seeing on their phones right now. Tracking pages that have not updated since the weekend. Delivery attempts failing because there is nowhere to put the parcel. Lockers showing as unavailable.
Why Vinted Sellers Should Care
The group feeling this most acutely is probably not who InPost had in mind when the decision was signed off.
InPost lockers are one of Vinted’s most heavily used shipping options in the UK.
A seller who dropped a parcel into an affected locker on Sunday will find the tracking has sat still for days, with a buyer growing more impatient by the hour.
On Vinted, late shipping hits seller ratings, triggers disputes, and in some cases prompts refunds before the parcel has even moved.
None of that is the seller’s fault, but they are the ones taking the hit.
eBay sellers, Depop sellers, and small businesses using InPost for fulfilment are in the same position.
Returns Are Also Caught in It
The other group quietly caught in the middle is anyone sending a return back through a retailer-provided InPost QR code.
Retailers like ASOS, Zara, and Vinted route huge volumes of returns through InPost lockers.
The refund clock only starts when the parcel is scanned out of the locker, not when the customer dropped it in.
If your locker was on one of the 230 affected routes, your refund has been delayed by at least 48 hours, and probably longer depending on how quickly the backlog clears.
The Fines Problem That Makes It Worse
There is one more detail that makes this story particularly uncomfortable for InPost.
Drivers are reportedly threatened with £30 fines for failing to fully empty a single locker, even when the cause is a software glitch, a faulty locker, or a customer dropping a parcel in while the driver is mid-stop.
Now those same drivers are being asked to deliver into lockers that are physically incapable of accepting any more parcels, because the network has engineered its own capacity crisis.
The company has essentially created the conditions for mass failure and left its self-employed drivers exposed to penalties they had no part in creating.
As the driver who wrote to us put it: “How can a full route be unserviced for one day?”
How to Tell If You Are Affected
InPost has not published a list of the 230 affected routes, so customers cannot check directly.
The tell-tale signs are simple enough.
A parcel showing as “awaiting collection” for more than 24 hours is a strong indicator.
An email or text from InPost telling you your parcel has been redirected to a different locker, or a tracking status along the lines of “Refused” followed by a new delivery location, points to the same root cause.
When a locker is full, InPost diverts the parcel to an alternative locker or shop within roughly a kilometre of the one you originally chose.
A Vinted buyer asking where their item is when your tracking has not updated since Sunday almost certainly fits the pattern.
A retailer insisting they have not received your return, several days after you dropped it off, is another.
Part of a Bigger Pattern
None of this is happening in isolation.
Our investigation into InPost’s first year running Yodel documented a string of rushed operational decisions, rate cuts, and a controversial fines regime that one service provider described as “a money generating task to claw back losses.”
The Sunday cuts fit the same pattern. A short-notice decision made on thin data, pushed through without consultation, with the consequences landing on drivers and customers rather than the balance sheet.
InPost posted a £20 million underlying loss in the UK in Q4 2025 and has been cutting costs on both sides of its operation ever since.
Sunday coverage is clearly the latest line item to go.
What Happens Next
The uncomfortable truth is that this is not a one-off bad week.
Every Sunday the routes stay cancelled, a new backlog builds.
Every Wednesday, it crashes back through the system.
Unless InPost reverses the decision or finds a way to absorb the Sunday volume elsewhere, the pattern we are watching play out this week is likely to repeat next week, and the week after that.
The drivers know it. The WhatsApp messages prove it.
The only people who do not seem to know it yet are the customers who are about to find out the hard way.
