Y2K22 bug: Microsoft issues fix for Exchange server

(Image Courtesy: Reuters)

Microsoft has issued a patch for the Y2K22 bug that clogged up Exchange servers with undelivered emails on January 1st.

A problem with naming convention of updates Microsoft issues to Exchange unintentionally broke functionality. Apparently, the way Microsoft dates updates (Year/Month/Day format) did not take into account that it had an arbitrary limit of 2147483647.

So, when the update named 220101001 was deployed, it overshot the limit and failed date checks. This affected Exchange versions 2016 and 2019.

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"The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it 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," Microsoft had said previously, speaking on the issue.

A fix has now been deployed by the company, which can either be manually applied or using an autorun script that will do so automatically.

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"We've created a solution to address the problem of messages stuck in transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019," said Microsoft on its support page.

"Because of a latent date issue in a signature file used by the malware scanning engine within Exchange Server. When the issue occurs, you’ll see errors in the Application event log on the Exchange Server, specifically event 5300 and 1106 (FIPFS)".