Y2K22 Bug: Microsoft's Exchange Servers fail as it races to fix the issue

(Image Courtesy: Reuters)

Tech giant Microsoft has confirmed that it is aware of an issue that is taking down Exchange Servers worldwide. Many people have reported seeing the error "FIP-FS Scan Engine failed to load—Can’t Convert “2201010001” to long (2022/01/01 00:00 UTC)".

The error, which users have theorised to be due to the "220101001" update, has apparently broken Microsoft's Filtering Management Service because it cannot handle the new date format.

"The reason for this is because Microsoft is using a signed int32 for the date and with the new value of 2.201.010.001 is over the max value of the “long” int being 2.147.483.647. This seems to be affecting Exchange versions 2016/2019," said Marius Sandbu (via Neowin), principal tech lead at Sopra Steria in Norway.

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Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, putting out a post on its support page:

"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 it 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."

The issue stems from Microsoft's naming scheme for updates, which uses the year, month and date before the update number. In this case, "220101" and the update number "0001".

This problem is that this field seems to have a limit of 31 bits, which means the maximum value is 2 to the power of 31, which is 2147483648. So when the calendar ticked over to 2022, the date check failed.

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Microsoft said its engineers were working on a fix but it could take some time to test and deploy. Till then, the only solution was to disable anti-malware scanning, leaving systems open to attack.