Users who send and receive mail through Microsoft Exchange Server they saw how with the arrival of the new year 2022 your mail was paralyzed by a bug. This failure, which is already called the “error of the year 2022”, a name received by the famous, in its day, “effect 2000” that haunted computers around the world at the turn of the century, was due to a problem in the FIP-FS antimalware scanner that resulted in crashes and various error messages when the system tried to receive new email messages. Basically, the system was unable to recognize the year 2022. All the above dates it recognized without problems.
Mail programs, according to Ars Technica. they stored dates and times as signed integers, reaching their limit at 2147483647. Microsoft uses the first two numbers of this figure in an update release to indicate the year in which it was released. As long as that year was 2021 or a year earlier, everything ran smoothly. But 2022 arrived, and the system stopped working with the release of a new version on New Year’s Day, 22010100001. The servers could not interpret the year marked by the first two digits, and mail delivery was interrupted.
Fortunately, Microsoft got to work early and has already fixed the bug, for which it has published an official patch. Anyone who has had this problem can apply it manually, or use an automated PowerShell script to kill it, which can be downloaded from this address. However, it also gives the possibility of using a manual option, which is the solution in case the script developed to end the problem does not work.
The solution, both manual and automatic, must run on each Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 server that the affected organizations have in place. The script, of course, can be executed in parallel on several servers. Of course, it may take some time to finish running, so administrators will have to have a little patience until they finish their work and fix the bug.
In a post on their support forums, the company claims that they have created «A workaround to correct the issue that has caused messages to get stuck in queues in Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 due to a latent date issue in a signature file used by the Exchange Server Malware Scanning Engine. When the failure occurs, you will see errors in the Application event log in Exchange Server. Specifically, errors 5300 and 1106 (FIPFS)«.
