December 2021 Exchange Server Cumulative Updates postponed

[The_Exchange_Team]

We wanted to let you know that we will not be releasing any Cumulative Updates (CUs) for Exchange Server in December. We will share more information about our next CU release at a later time.

In the meantime, please keep your servers updated!

The Exchange Team

[JB365]

Thanks for letting us know!  Any planned security patches in lieu of the CU?  

[susika512]

Hello, thank you. Since the 8th of december there were no more exchange antimalware engine updates. https://serverfault.com/questions/1085840/exchange-2019-antimalware-engine-updates-download-but-dont...

Is it a common problem?

[fotis_1908]

Thanks for letting us know!

[Nino Bilic]

@JB365 As of right now, please just keep updating your environments with November updates!

@susika512 Thank you for this; we have someone looking at it!

[JB365]

Thanks @Nino Bilic !

[susika512]

@Nino Bilic thanks. I will have a look what U find out.

[gleach700]

Hi Team,

Given that the December CU has been postponed, is there a tentative release date for CU23 in January so that I can plan a patch window?

I'm used to these CU updates being in the 2nd or 3rd week of the month

[TomParis1975]

Me, too would definitely be interested to know more as well, to plan over the holidays and the new year, as well as for security updates - which seem to also not be coming these days for Exchange? was looking out for them last evening here.. (europe) . thank you guys a lot and have some relaxing pre-christmas days..

[Exchange_SME]

Any update in regards to the Exchange antimalware engine updates not working?

[susika512]

Hello again. Don't know if my MS Ticket or my question here in this forum did the trick: the engine updates are working since early morning @Nino Bilic :)

[SWM01]

Lets hope they are working on the Big Funnel search issue in EX2019. My users haven't been able to search for emails in Outlook for 8 months. Logged a MS case with no success and its a bug, with no fix at this stage. Been watching every CU release with hope its addressed. Sadly not yet 

[Bjoern_Lausen]

Is there an update in regards to the Exchange antimalware Agent not working?

Updates works now but, the queue stucks if i re-enable the malware-agent.

[JulianSiebert]

Hi,

just wait until 2022, then a signed long is not big enough for a 6 digit date + 4 digit time or serial number or whatever:

The FIP-FS "Microsoft" Scan Engine failed to load. PID: 10816, Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can't convert "2201010002" to long.

Nice message to start a new year :D

[Andrew Bucklin]

@JulianSiebert - I think you're onto something! https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/rt91z6/exchange_2019_antimalware_bad_update/

[Jerry Locke]

Well done Microsoft! Happy new year and all that rot. I would have sent an email, but it wasn't working.

@JulianSiebert and @Andrew Bucklin, I came here to post the link to that Reddit article. From there, the workaround for now seems to be this:

set-malwarefilteringserver -bypassfiltering $true -identity [name-of-exchange-server]

This kills malware filtering entirely, hopefully someone on the MS Exchange team is going to provide a proper fix soon. I don't envy whoever is working on that!

[Clive_Flint]

I was woken at 3am because of this.

Nice of goold ol' Microshaft to come up with this.

Still waiting for the Big Funnel search in Exchange 2019 to be fixed, so won't be holding my breath for this one.

[MartinMa0522]

My company this morning was wrong, but because fip-fs update engine, load the engine fails to produce the message queue, I cannot send and receive internal external mail. 

Engine : Microsoft
LastChecked : 01/01/2022 01:46:35 下午 +08:00
LastUpdated : 01/01/2022 12:49:27 下午 +08:00
EngineVersion : 1.1.18800.4
SignatureVersion : 1.355.1222.0
SignatureDateTime : 01/01/2022 07:37:53 上午 +08:00
UpdateVersion : 2201010003
UpdateStatus : UpdateAttemptNoUpdate

[Johnny_Yao_Taiwan]

Happy New year. 

Same issue happened suddenly today morning. Anti-malware agent caused queue stuck on global Exchange servers. 

The workaround same as above temp stop filter agent. 

[Clive_Flint]

A fix *before* this became an issue would have been fantastic.

It seems that some people could see that this might be an issue a few weeks ago, yet Microshaft seems to have done nothing to fix it.

There's a lot of Sys Admins up at the moment dealing with broken exchange servers.

[gghiq1040]

Happy new year! Did some - UNRELATED - maintenance work and all the sudden mails got stuck in the queue. only disabling Anti-malware agent restored mail flow again? What is going on?

[SergePotem]

Hi all,

Yep, the same problem. The workaround with bypassing the filters works.

[SPSBjorn]

Thanks a lot Microsoft for letting me look for the cause of this issue on four Exchange environments just after 2 am all at the same time (+_ a few minutes).

Great start of 2022 :( !!

Thanks Reddit SysAdmins for the quick fix!! https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/rt91z6/exchange_2019_antimalware_bad_update/

Can someone explain the real impact of disabling the filter? Does it effect third party AV/malware scanning tools on the Exchange servers too?

[Sander_de_Bruin]

Thanks Reddit Sysadmins!!

[SPSBjorn]

Some people are mentioning an updated Engine that fixes this issue. Trying to download the engine manually (using https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/setup/manually-update-scan-engines and manually in browser) , but the speed is ridiculous. Trying primary and fallback URL. Both very slow. It looks like I am not alone..

Can someone at Microsoft please confirm that an engine update fixes this "long" issue? Or do we really have to wait for the latest to be released CU?

[marrrtin2884]

Can't believe it - 17 hours later and still no comment from the Microsoft regarding the "2022" Bug :(

[audi911]

Where are people looking to get an official response from MS?

Is there a site where we can track what is going on and when a fix will be issued?

[David_Richard]

@audi911 use https://www.alitajran.com/exchange-mail-flow-breaks/

the updates are shown below.

[evandromalmsteen]

I had the same problem yesterday at 23PM!

Event ID: 7036 - The Microsoft Filtering Management Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 14 time(s).

Event ID: 1106 - The FIP-FS Scan Process failed initialization. Error: 0x80004005. Error Details: Unspecified error

Event ID: 5300 - The FIP-FS "Microsoft" Scan Engine failed to load. PID: 61872, Error Code: 0x80004005. Error Description: Can't convert "2201010001" to long.

I tryed this, but no success:

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Forefront.Filtering.Management.Powershell

Get-EngineUpdateInformation

cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Scripts'

$Computer = $ENV:ComputerName

.\Update-MalwareFilteringServer.ps1 -Identity $Computer

I used this workaround yesterday temporarily:

Get-TransportAgent "Malware Agent" | Disable-TransportAgent -Confirm:$false

Stop-Service msexchangetransport

sleep 5

Start-Service msexchangetransport

Get-TransportAgent "Malware Agent"

Any fix?

[audi911]

Thank you very much for sharing that link David Richard.

[Carlin Zotz]

Thanks to all those that helped.  This had us stumped and glad I came across this.  We bypassed for now to get our smtp working, but MS releasing something with a bug figures.  Let us know when you get an update and kudos!

[Jerry Locke]

The fix, when it comes, will probably be in the form of a patch to fix the affected components to use something bigger than an unsigned long integer datatype to store the version number.

A quick workaround, which should fix the problem instantly, would be for them to stop releasing the updates as "220101xxxx" and go back to something like "211301xxxx" as in the 13th month of 2021, that should get them plenty of time to develop a proper fix.

[NavUKUK]

In reply to the comment ..... Users can not search in Outlook 

Create a new Exchange Datastore and migrate a User to the new Datastore. Test the search function it should work in Outlook.

Migrate all users and delete the old Datastore.

[SWM01]

hi 

NavUKUK

I can create a new Datastore but cannot move any mailboxes and the move option fails as my search is not uptodate.........

So I am stuck 

[SPSBjorn]

MS Exchange Team posted an update/fix, but forgot to mention it here.

@Jerry Lockethey used your suggestion: "verify the UpdateVersion information is 2112330001" 

See: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/email-stuck-in-transport-queues/ba-p/30494...

[marc-Sum]

For what its worth, I just completed doing this fix to 5 separate exchange systems and the fix ranged from successful to unsuccessful, .. and not updated.  So the steps that definitely made a difference.

1. Run as administrator.

2. Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned.

3. Manually close Microsoft Filtering Management service and make sure Transport is also stopped, and manually end task updateservice. (The script does not wait long enough and errors popup, so do it manually before your run the script.

4. Run update-MalwareFilteringServer.ps1 from the scripts folder.

Some went through without a hitch, connection seemed good while some the connection timed out, my guess is Microsoft is getting bombarded with connections.  So I checked Get-EngineUpdateInformation and if I do not have successful I run it again. Eventually I get a good connection to download the update and the update completes, the ones that I are still not working I am bypassing filtering to empty the queues and then I run again and it worked. I them turn filtering back on. 

Hope this helps anyone out there 

Marc

[Dennisdsmolinski]

Will there be an Exchange Cumulative Update coming this month?  If so will it be for both Exchange 2019 and 2016 and are we waiting for the 3rd Tuesday for it to be announced and released?

[hong2140]

thanks

[Lupo65]

Any news on the original topic? When will the "December" CUs be released?

[BradleyM1275]

Also replicating the question of release dates for the latest CU's ?

[Lupo65]

...customers keep asking and I hoped the "later time" in "We will share more information about our next CU release at a later time." might have come in the meantime after more than 7 weeks ...

[SWM01]

10 weeks later ...........

[PriitV]

It has been 6 months since last CU for Exchange. Is there any updates on when we can expect next one to be releasing?

[evepanics]

Will there be a CU23 for Exch 2016? Or are we done here? 

[Kopfi]

Looks like Exchange On Prem is finalized with no code changes.