Exchange has been affected by the change of year: Microsoft recognizes a bug that prevents the arrival of emails and works on a solution

Do you remember the 2000 effect? With the change of figures and of the year, many had the problems that could be generated in the computer equipment. In the end it was not as serious as thought and now Microsoft Exchange is the platform that has been affected by a failure related to the change of year A failure that we could experience again in the year 2038

Users are seeing how the Microsoft Exchange Inbox is empty and no, it is not a fault with the corresponding email server.Microsoft Exchange in the 2016 and 2019 versions is being the victim of a bug related to the change of year that is generated when processing the new date.

The 2022 Effect

An error that the company itself has already recognized The antispam and antimalware engine of MS Exchange (FIP-FS, activated by default in installations of said platform since its 2013 version) is generating a failure when updating to the new date, a bug that is causing a multitude of emails not to reach their recipients.

This problem appears to be caused by the fact that developers at Microsoft decided to store the date value in an int32whose maximum value is 2,147,483,647. This is the opinion of Joseph Roosen, a cybersecurity researcher, who affirms that the failure is that they did it in such a way that the smallest of the dates corresponding to this year had to occupy a minimum value of '2.201.010.001' (that is, using the last three digits to store the day and the previous three to store the month).

In this way, the antispam and antimalware engine of MS Exchange is not able to understand the date of the emails and these are not reaching users' computers.

Microsoft has recognized the bug and from the company they advise that they are already working on a patch to correct the problem that affects the 2016 versions and Microsoft Exchange 2019:

This failure mainly affects corporate emails and to correct the failure while the corrective patch is released, those affected have no more The only remedy is to temporarily disable the FIP-FS engine, a solution that, however, leaves the teams unprotected, as they remain exposed to the arrival of malicious emails. To temporarily disable the FIP-FS engine, type the following PowerShell commands on the Exchange Server:

• Set-MalwareFilteringServer -Identity -BypassFiltering $true

• Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport

With these steps, users will get their emails back and it is the only solution at least until Microsoft releases the final fix patch .