Microsoft is beginning 2022 with a flashback to Y2K bugs. Bleeping Computer experiences the corporate has launched a brief repair for a bug that broke e mail supply for on-premises Exchange 2016 and 2019 servers on New Year’s Day. As customers found, Exchange was attempting to retailer model date checks for its antivirus scanning engine in a 32-bit integer variable — an enormous downside when any date from January 1st, 2022 onward was too giant. Any new checks made the malware engine crash and left e mail caught in a queue.
The emergency repair makes use of a PowerShell script to pause two providers, exchange the older antivirus engine information with newer ones that use a brand new quantity sequence, and restart operations. The repair requires handbook enter and will take a very long time to implement for bigger corporations, however an automated resolution is in improvement.
This should not have an effect on different Exchange clients. The timing can also be ‘perfect’ as a vacation weekend possible restricted the demand for e mail. Company IT managers most likely did not wish to begin 2022 patching servers, although, and it is unclear why Microsoft did not foresee a date challenge with software program launched just some years in the past. Whatever the reasoning, this serves as a transparent lesson about anticipating date bugs.