Microsoft, over the weekend, rolled out a fix to address an issue that caused email messages to get stuck on its Exchange Server platforms due to what it blamed on a date validation error at around the turn of the year.

“The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it [is] not a failure of the [antivirus] engine itself,” the company said in a blog post. “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.”

The Windows maker said the issue impacted on-premises versions of Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 but didn’t specify how widespread the impact was.

The issue began to gain attention as the year 2022 kicked in, causing the servers to no longer deliver email messages while throwing the following error message: “The FIP-FS ‘Microsoft’ Scan Engine failed to load. PID: 23092, Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can’t convert ‘2201010001’ to long.”