• by Ray Schultz , January 3, 2022

Microsoft says it has corrected a problem that reportedly was blocking email delivery on Saturday. However, users have to take actions to correct the issue.  

“We have addressed the issue causing messages to be stuck in transport queues of on-premises Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019,” Microsoft says in a blog post. “The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it not a failure of the AV engine itself.” 

Microsoft continues: “This is not an issue with malware scanning or the malware engine, and it is not a security-related issue. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues.”

“Implementation of the solution requires customer actions, and it will take some time to make the necessary changes, download the updated files, and clear the transport queues,” Microsoft states. 

The company adds: “Depending on the size of your organization, the script might take some time to run; please be patient.”

Bleeping Computer reports that, “starting with Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft enabled the FIP-FS anti-spam and anti-malware scanning engine by default to protect users from malicious email.

The report says that according to reports from Microsoft Exchange admins worldwide, “a bug in the FIP-FS engine is blocking email delivery with on-premise servers starting at midnight on January 1st, 2022.”