Adobe Fixes Day-Long Creative Cloud Login Outage

Adobe says it has restored an online service that had prevented customers of its Creative Cloud from using their software normally for more than 24 hours.

The problem was caused by a database failure that occured during maintenance activity, Adobe said in a blog post. It affected services that require users to log in with an Adobe ID: users who were already logged in weren’t affected, but if they needed to perform operations requiring them to log back in, such as switching from one computer to another, they found themselves unable to use the software.

Apology

The bug also affected secondary features such as logging into the Adobe website, making purchases or upgrades, synchronising font files and carrying out administration tasks, according to Adobe. Users who were unable to log in were able, in some cases, to use their software in trial mode, the company said.

“We want to apologise for this outage because we know how critical our services are to you and how disruptive it’s been to those of you who felt the impact,” Adobe stated. “We understand that the time it took to restore service has been frustrating, but we wanted to be as thorough as possible.”

The company said it has identified the “root cause” of the failure and is putting standards in place to prevent the issue from recurring.

Adobe notified users via Twitter that the problem had been fixed on Friday morning at 2 a.m. BST. The company first acknowledged the issue at around 8 p.m. BST on Wednesday evening, meaning the issue affected customers for about a day and a half.

Subscription growth

Adobe has made steady progress in signing up customers for Creative Cloud, which runs on the desktop but accesses some services over the Internet, and said it had around 1.84 million users as of February. Adobe launched the subscription pricing model, which offers plans starting at $30 (£20) to $75 per month, in 2012.

Last year Adobe was affected by a security breach in which attackers stole email addresses and passwords for some 38 million users, as well as the source code for some high-profile products.

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