For many of us, New Year’s Eve was the night that allowed us to breathe for a short time after a difficult year. But that’s certainly not the case for system administrators responsible for Exchange servers. Christmas gave them a little nightmare as their Microsoft Exchange servers weren’t able to process the date properly as they entered the new year, and so they had a problem with their mail.
Microsoft Exchange servers completely stopped processing mail as it was not ready to process January 1, 2022. Without going into technical details, system administrators had to disable scanning for malware on exchange servers so mail could continue to be processed. This meant that users and possibly servers were vulnerable to attacks. Fortunately, there are no reported attacks.
The bug, named Y2K22 among users, affected Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019. Microsoft quickly reacted to the problem and released a temporary fix.