Microsoft has provided a fix for a fault that caused certain email messages on its Exchange servers to become stuck owing to a new-year-related date validation failure, according to the company. The issue wasn't security-related, according to the company's blog post, which didn't specify how prevalent the problem was. A subsequent version included two remedies, one that could be applied to all of a client's servers and the other that had to be individually applied to individual servers.

According to the firm, the fault caused messages to become blocked in transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019.

You're not alone if you awoke on January 1st, 2022, to find your work email inbox abnormally empty. According to a report by Bleeping Computer, Microsoft rang in the New Year with a flaw that prohibits Exchange servers from delivering emails, but thankfully, a remedy has now been published . 'The issue is related to a date check failure with the change of the new year and is not a failure of the AV engine itself,' Microsoft said in a Tech Community forum post. 'The malware engine crashes due to version validation against the signature file, leading messages to become blocked in transport queues.'

In its blog post, Microsoft details the problem's remedy, which requires administrators to either manually execute the change or use an automated script. The document also includes a comprehensive FAQ, indicating that administrators would need 'some time' to apply the remedy. It may take some time for the messages to reach their target recipients' inboxes, depending on how many emails are delayed in the queue.

At 12 a.m. on January 1st, problems began to appear, prompting one Exchange administrator on Reddit to raise the matter. Administrators began seeing problem messages in the Exchange Server's Event Log, such as 'The FIP-FS Scan Process failed startup,' according to Bleeping Computer. 0x8004005 is the error code. 'Unspecified Error' or 'Error Code: 0x80004005' are examples of error messages. During the time it took Microsoft to correct the problem, administrators were compelled to come up with different solutions, but now that Microsoft has provided an official patch, the Y2K22 crisis appears to be gone.