The Y2K22 Bug

Do you ever think, “why are IT systems so damn unpredictable?”

Well, here is the latest spanner in the works. And it is a doozy.

We support and manage a lot of Microsoft Exchange email servers and they have all had a terrible start to the new year – none of them are able to send or receive emails!

Dubbed the y2k22 bug, the issue is caused by the way Microsoft Exchange (and probably plenty of other bits of software) store dates and times – using a 32bit integer. An integer is a whole number, which can have up to 32 binary bits, resulting in a maximum value of 2^31 or 2147483647. The problem today is that when you take any date in the year 2022 onwards in the format YYMMDDhhmm, the conversion to a long integer fails because it exceeds the maximum possible value that can be stored.

While Microsoft is currently working on a fix, the immediate work around is to disable the anti malware scanning component, which seems to be the part actually stopping mail from flowing at the current time. What else stores dates this way and is also broken? Probably a lot of things.

You can follow the story on Twitter, where the Microsoft Exchange team @msexchangeteam are being constantly tagged. My favourite part of the whole story? Twitter is parsing “sex change” from “msexchangeteam” and labeling all the threads as a “heavy conversation”.

2021 was not a great year for Microsoft Exchange servers, with new vulnerabilities, hacks and other issues. For now, Office 365 and our Zimbra mail servers don’t seem to be having any issues.

But at this point, the only thing I am certain of, is that whatever breaks next, we will get busy fixing it.