Do you remember the 2000 effect? With the change in figures and the year, many had problems that could be generated in 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 ruling 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 versions 2016 and 2019 is falling victim to a failure related to the year change that is generated when processing the new date.
The 2022 effect
An error that has already been recognized by the company itself. The MS Exchange antispam and antimalware engine (FIP-FS, activated by default in the installations of that platform since its 2013 version) is generating a failure when updating to the new date, a bug that is causing many emails to be missing. reaching their recipients.
Apparently this problem is caused by developers at Microsoft decided at the time to store the value of the date in a variable int32 whose maximum value is 2,147,483,647. This is what Joseph Roosen thinks, a cybersecurity researcher, who states 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 figures to store the day and the previous three for the month).
In this way, the MS Exchange antispam and antimalware engine not able to understand the date of the emails and these are not reaching users’ computers.
Microsoft has recognized the failure and from the company they warn that they are already working on a patch to correct the problem It affects the 2016 and 2019 versions of Microsoft Exchange:
“Our engineers were working around the clock on a solution that would eliminate the need for customer action, but we determined that any patch that did not involve such action would require several days to develop and roll out. So we are working on another update, which validation is now in its final testing phase. “
This ruling mainly affects corporate emails and to fix the bug while the patch is released, those affected have no choice but to temporarily deactivate the FIP-FS engine, a solution that nevertheless leaves teams unprotected, leaving them exposed to the arrival of malicious emails. To temporarily disable the FIP-FS engine, type the following PowerShell commands in Exchange Server:
With these steps, users will receive their emails again and it is the only solution at least until Microsoft releases the final corrective patch.