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New Year Bug Brings Down Microsoft Exchange Mail Servers Worldwide
On New Year’s Eve, Microsoft faced a similar bug scare reminiscent of the Y2K bug scare which occurred at the turn of the century. Problems started cropping up at midnight on January 1st 2022 after a bug “Y2K22” prevented Exchange servers from sending emails.
The exchange server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. The Exchange on-premise servers were unable to deliver email on January 1st, 2022, due to a “Year 2022” bug in the FIP-FS anti-malware scanning engine.
According to experts, “dates in 2022 have a minimum value of 2,201,010,001, which is greater than the maximum value that can be stored in the signed int32 variable. This caused the scanning engine to fail and not release mail for delivery”.
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Microsoft told users, “We are aware of and working on an issue causing messages to be stuck in transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019. The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and is not a failure of the AV engine itself. This is not an issue with malware scanning or the malware engine, and it is not a security-related issue. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues. We are actively working on resolving this issue and expect to release details on how to resolve this issue later today,”
Microsoft has since solved the problem.