Microsoft issues a fix for the Exchange Y2K22 error that closed company emails

If you discovered that your work email inbox was empty, you are not alone. Microsoft announced the New Year with a bug that prevents Exchange servers from sending emails, but thankfully, a fix has since been issued, as detailed in a report by Bleeping Computer.

"The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and is not a failure of the AV engine itself," Microsoft explains in a post on its Tech Community forum. "The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues."

Microsoft describes the solution to the problem in its post, requiring administrators to implement the solution manually or apply an automated script. The post also contains detailed FAQs, noting that the answer will "take some time" for administrators to implement. And based on how many emails are stuck in the queue, it may take a while for messages to reach the intended recipients' inboxes.

The problems began to surface at midnight on January 1, and an Exchange admin on Reddit drew attention to the problem. As Bleeping Computer explains, administrators began to notice error messages in the Exchange Server event log, like "The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialization. Error: 0x8004005. Error Details: Unspecified Error" or "Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can't convert "2201010001" to long."

Administrators were forced to find workarounds during the time it took Microsoft to address the issue, but now that the company has released an official fix, it appears that the Y2K22 crisis is over.