The image is by Alex Castro.
If you woke up on January 1st, 2022, and found that your work email inbox was empty, you are not alone. A bug in Exchange prevented it from sending emails on New Year's Day, but fortunately, a fix was issued after a report by Bleeping Computer.
The problem is related to the change of the new year.
Microsoft says that the problem is not a failure of the engine, but a failure of the date check. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the engine to crash and cause messages to be stuck in transport queue.
Microsoft requires administrators to either manually implement the fix or apply an automated script in order to fix the problem. The solution will take some time for administrators to implement according to the FAQ. Depending on how many emails are stuck in the queue, it may take a while for the messages to land in their intended recipients' inboxes.
The Exchange administrator on the site called attention to the issues at midnight on January 1st. Bleeping Computer explained that administrators began to notice error messages in the Exchange server's event log. The error is 0x8004005. The error code is 0x80004005. Can't convert "2201010001" to long.
The Y2K22 crisis is over now that Microsoft has released an official fix, but administrators were forced to come up with alternate solutions during the time it took for Microsoft to address the issue.
