Microsoft is kicking in 2022 with a throwback to Y2K bugs. According to reports, the company has provided a temporary remedy for a bug that disrupted email delivery on New Year’s Day for on-premises Exchange 2016 and 2019 servers. Users observed that Exchange was attempting to store version date checks for its antivirus scanning engine in a 32-bit integer variable – a major issue because any date from January 1st, 2022 onwards was too huge. Any additional checks caused the malware engine to break, leaving mails in a backlog.
A PowerShell script is used in the emergency repair to suspend two services, replace the outdated antivirus engine files with fresh ones that use a different number sequence, and restart operations. The repair requires manual input and may take a long time to execute for bigger businesses, but an automatic solution is in the works.
Other Exchange clients should be unaffected by this. The timing is also ‘ideal,’ as a holiday weekend likely reduced email demand. IT administrators at the company probably didn’t want to start updating servers in 2022, and it’s unclear why Microsoft didn’t anticipate a date issue with software published only a few years ago. Whatever the reasons, this is a clear lesson in the importance of predicting date problems.
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