A few days ago, I spoke to you about this global outage which affected Microsoft 365 and Exchange, and you can imagine that the problems continue on the side of Microsoft, which has just corrected… its fix!
It all started on November 12, when MS deployed its monthly security update for Exchange Server. On paper, nothing extraordinary, just a routine update to plug a few flaws. Except that system administrators are starting to notice some rather strange behavior: their transport rules are starting to mysteriously malfunction.
For those who are not immersed in the Exchange world on a daily basis, transport rules are the central nervous system of an Exchange mail server. They manage all email traffic, redirections, filtering – in short, critical functions. And when things go off the rails, it quickly becomes panic on board.
Faced with this situation, some administrators had to show creativity. Some have even gone so far as to create scheduled tasks to restart transport services every 30 minutes! A makeshift solution that is a bit reminiscent of those old Windows 98 computers that we restarted regularly.to make it work better”. Not really ideal in a professional setting in 2024.
Microsoft therefore had to backtrack and suspend the deployment of its update. The technical teams rolled up their sleeves to understand the origin of the bug and concocted a new version, called SUv2 (Security Update version 2). The good news is that Exchange Online was not affected by these issues, only on-premises or hybrid Exchange servers required these fixes.
To avoid the risk of further disrupting the servers, Microsoft has decided to postpone the automatic deployment of this patch until December, thus avoiding the Thanksgiving holiday period in the United States. We appreciate the attention, even if it makes us smile when we think of the administrators who have to juggle their planned tasks while waiting.
For those wondering what to do now if you had the first version (SUv1) installed and are still having issues:
- Uninstall the problematic update
- Install the new SUv2 version
- Delete your automatic restart scripts
And if you haven’t updated yet:
- Wait until December for automatic update
- Or manually install the SUv2 version if you are in a hurry
And if everything works despite installing the first version, Microsoft still recommends installing SUv2 because this version provides better control over the detection of non-compliant P2 FROM headers
In short, this incident reminds us that even tech giants are not immune to bugs and that sometimes, a solution to one problem can create others. I know something about it, I keep creating bugs in my bugs… lol
Source : The Register
