Adobe blames 'maintenance failure' for 27-hour outage

Unidentified 'root cause' borks the system during work on database

Adobe has blamed a maintenance failure for the 27-hour outage in its Creative Cloud suite that left video and photo editors unable to log into online services.

“The failure happened during database maintenance activity and affected services that require users to log in with an Adobe ID,” Adobe said in a blog post apologising for the down-time.

“We understand that the time it took to restore service has been frustrating, but we wanted to be as thorough as possible. We have identified the root cause of this failure and are putting standards in place to prevent this from happening again.”

The Reg has asked Adobe what that “root cause” might be, but the company hadn’t gotten back to us at the time of publication.

That leaves the software firm's own maintenance as the top culprit, a rather dim prospect for users worried about whether this sort of thing might happen again. If Twitter is any indication, graphics pros are not feeling very forgiving, even now that the service is back online.

Anybody who was suspicious about Adobe Creative Cloud is probably now feeling quite vindicated. Anyone who thought Adobe were assholes also

— Matt Mower (@sandbags) May 16, 2014

@creativecloud @adobecare Have you considered the actual impact this has had on the creative community? I had 22 users unable to work!!!

— Alan Edwards (@alantedwards) May 16, 2014

Other Twitter users said they weren’t happy with the “dumb responses” from Adobe on the issue or that the outage pointed out the problem with having so much creative software centralised on a single service.

Highlighting the ridiculous risk of accepting Adobe's monopoly over the creative industry: RT @ntlk: cloud.gif http://t.co/kfnxRmLtLI

— Benjamin Williams (@benjaminjosephw) May 16, 2014

Meanwhile users of older versions of the software – who still have hard copies of older versions of the software, before it flew into the cloud, were busily rubbing their colleagues’ faces in it and vowing not to upgrade.

One reason I will never get a new copy of Photoshop: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work @ http://t.co/r5aklv7Op9

— Chuck Fry (@SVChucko) May 16, 2014

Adobe’s new business model relies on getting people to upgrade to its latest version of Creative Suite, which it has turned from an expensive piece of software into a cloud-based subscription service. Users can no longer get up-to-date box versions of its hugely popular graphics apps bundle, which includes Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere and InDesign to name a few.

So far though, the move has not gone as smoothly as the firm might have liked. In the early days of the move, the storage part of the cloud service forgot to sync users’ files for a whole fortnight, while late last year, the firm was hit with a security breach that leaked the login details for as many as 38 million customers. ®