Microsoft rolls out critical patch to fix email bug

As people around the world welcomed the new year 2022 over the weekend, several Microsoft communication service users were in for a little disappointment as they could not send any emails on January 1, 2021.

It has come to light that a glitch in the malware detection system caused date check failure and emails got stuck at exchange servers and couldn't get redirected to the recipients.

Apparently, the FIP-FS antivirus scanning engine of the Microsoft Exchange server, while attempting to store the new date in a signed int32 variable, was less and couldn't process it.

The aforementioned variable had 2,147,483,647 values, which is less than the new date value of 2,201,010,001 for January 1st, 2022, at midnight.

"The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it not a failure of the AV engine itself. This is not an issue with malware scanning or the malware engine, and it is not a security-related issue. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues," Microsoft said.

Now, the company has addressed the problem of messages stuck in transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019.

Microsoft has asked system admins in companies and other business establishments to update their systems to fix the glitch.

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