If your USPS tracking has shown a processing scan from a city you never shipped to, the scan is real. USPS is diverting volume around facilities under construction, and the work has weeks left to run.
Supply Chain Dive reported Friday that the Postal Service is warning of delays in Indianapolis and Louisville while it installs new package sorting equipment across the region. (Supply Chain Dive, September 25, 2026)
The machines are better than what they replace. The month they are landing in is the problem.
What USPS is putting in
The Indianapolis regional processing and distribution center is installing equipment that sorts large and oversized packages, a category it had been handling by hand. A USPS message dated September 21 said the work would be finalized over the next two to three weeks, and that routing changes are underway to improve flows into and out of the region. (Supply Chain Dive, September 25, 2026) The delay notice went up on PostalPro the same day. (USPS PostalPro, September 21, 2026)
Louisville is a second-order problem. That facility is not the one being upgraded. It has been covering for an Evansville, Indiana site that is, and it has run behind all month as a result. A September 22 notice said USPS would divert some of that volume again, to its Nashville processing center and to an annex in Springdale, Ohio. (Supply Chain Dive)
Local reporting puts a date on the slip. Louisville's Gardiner Lane facility was supposed to be clear by September 20. It was not, and no new completion date has been published. Equipment work is also running at Knoxville, Tennessee and at Evansville. (WDRB, September 23, 2026)
Four more metros are absorbing installation shifts this month: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Tampa, and Nashville. Columbus is not on the list.
Why the crews come in September
This is the tail end of a long build. USPS added 600 package sorting machines over five years through December 2025, taking its stated daily package capacity from 60 million to 88 million. (Supply Chain Dive, April 8, 2026)
The machines have to go in during some month, and November is worse. Louisville's central processing region moves 177 million mailpieces a day across roughly 100 facilities, so none of this happens invisibly. (Supply Chain Dive) September is the last month with enough slack to absorb a two week outage. That is why the crews are there now, and why the calendar risk sits with shippers instead of with the Postal Service.
The exposure most brands read wrong
Origin and destination are separate problems, and brands usually check only the first.
Where you inject sets the first scan. Where your customer lives sets the last one. A package entering the network at a clean facility still has to clear the destination hub, so a brand nowhere near Indiana can watch days get added to its Kentucky and Tennessee deliveries and never find a cause in its own operation.
Pull transit time by destination region, not the average across all orders.
What this means for your brand
If you run 1,000 to 25,000 orders a month on USPS, four things are worth doing this week.
Sort your last 14 days of scan data by destination state. Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and Ohio are the four to isolate. Compare each against your own August baseline, not a published service standard.
Look for Nashville and Springdale scans. Those are where diverted Louisville volume is going. A scan at either one on a package that should have cleared Louisville tells you the diversion caught your order.
Change your shipping page language now, not in December. Replace any single number delivery promise with a range. Doing that in September costs nothing. Doing it after a customer complains costs a refund.
Decide your oversized plan. Indianapolis is automating a category that was sorted by hand until now, and new equipment running an unfamiliar package type is the likeliest place for freight to sit. If a meaningful share of your SKUs are large or awkward, route those to another service for a few weeks and leave the small parcels alone.
Our position: stop treating published USPS transit windows as a planning input until the installs finish. Use your own scan data. It is the only number describing what is actually happening to your packages.
Where inventory sits does the rest
Moby Dick ships out of Canal Winchester, Ohio, just outside Columbus, which is not among the facilities USPS has named for equipment work this month. From central Ohio, 90 percent of our customers are reached in two days by ground, and 60 percent of the US and Canada population sits within 600 miles. Fewer orders depend on a long haul through a hub under construction. The zone math is on our Columbus, Ohio page.
We carry USPS, UPS, DHL, and FlavorCloud for cross border. When one network slows in one region, an order can move to another service instead of waiting for a backlog to clear. That call gets made per order inside how ecommerce fulfillment runs here.
Peak fees stack on top of all of it, and we laid the carrier windows out side by side in the 2026 peak fee stack. Want your destination mix read against current network conditions? Get in touch.
FAQ
Should I move off USPS for the holidays?
Not wholesale. Move the exposed slice. Oversized parcels and orders landing in the affected region are where the risk concentrates, and both can be routed to another service without rebuilding your shipping setup.
Does this change my drop shipments or FAST appointments?
USPS said earlier this year that its installation program does not change customer drop locations or appointment scheduling in the Facility Access and Shipment Tracking system. Packages get diverted after they enter the network, not before. (Supply Chain Dive, April 8, 2026)