Since Jan. 1, 2022, mail traffic over Exchange has been down worldwide. Today Microsoft is publishing a fix for the Exchange bug so that all emails will flow in smoothly again.
Those who had to work last weekend and needed email to do so will have been scratching their heads. IT admins worldwide received error messages in Exchange’s event log everywhere with error codes like ‘The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialization. Error: 0x80004005. Error Details: Unspecified Error’ or ‘Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can’t convert “2201010001” to long.’
Creative IT admins were able to mitigate the error with temporary fixes after finding the culprit, but we imagine they presumably had other plans on New Year’s Day.
In an extensive blog post from Microsoft, the tech giant points to an error in date checkoff within an Exchange antivirus component. Suddenly checking off 2022 everywhere with a particular signature caused the malware engine to crash. This caused all emails worldwide to get stuck in a long file of messages.
In the same blog post, IT admins can implement the solution manually or run an automatic script. It may still take some time for emails to reappear in your inbox. The more emails stuck in the queue since New Year’s, the longer the wait.
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