At the turn of the Millennium, the world was afraid that as the clock struck midnight, the Y2K bug was going to destroy all of our lives. That wound up being fake news. 22 years later though, and it actually happened…to Exchange 2016 users anyway.
According to an article on Bleeping Computer, Microsoft gave all of us admin a New Years gift thanks to some bad code in the anti-malware scanning engine enabled in MS Exchange server 2013 and up. Long story short: the anti-malware software doesn’t currently process the value of dates in the year 2022 properly, so the software will simply stop Exchange from releasing any emails–what could go wrong?
Thankfully, there is a workaround. A little PowerShell kung-fu to disable the scanning engine and your emails will be flowing like the cheap wine you drank on New Years that made this whole thing a bit harder to troubleshoot, now didn’t it? Worst issue is that now the anti-malware scanning is disabled for your Exchange environment. Also, Microsoft just released a patch for it, but I’m sure it works just fine and we can all trust it right away. Again, what’s the worst that’ll happen, right?
Tune into this Reddit thread to keep abreast of the latest troubleshooting tricks and updates as well as listen to the stories of all the other admin whom had their weekend ruined by this bug.
Happy New Year!
