Database Maintenance Caused Adobe Creative Cloud Downtime

Adobe Creative Cloud is now back up and running after a major issue which caused extensive downtime across the world yesterday.

If you're a Creative Cloud user, you most certainly won't have missed the fact that the service fell apart yesterday, with many left unable to do critical work throughout an outage which lasted in excess of 24 hours. In fact, not only were Creative Cloud services inaccessible all of Thursday, but according to some of our readers, the problem actually started on Wednesday afternoon (at around 14:00 according to one reader – potentially meaning the downtime was closing on 40 hours for some folks).

Adobe finally got the problem sorted six hours ago, very early this morning, according to the Adobe Customer Care Twitter account, which stated: "We have restored Adobe login services and all services are now online. We will be sharing a complete update on the outage soon."

That complete update on the matter then followed on the Adobe blog, where the company wrote: "Several Adobe services were down or unreachable for many of you over the last 24 hours. The failure happened during database maintenance activity and affected services that require users to log in with an Adobe ID."

"First, and most importantly, 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. 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."

So, it was a failure during database maintenance work – a somewhat vague explanation, as the actual "root cause" isn't specified.

The outage has, as we saw in the comments on our news story yesterday, affected a lot of people working on projects with critical deadlines – and it does raise issues on Adobe's (apparently lucrative) shift to the cloud with its Creative suite. With traditional boxed software, your local machine might go down; but at least you can do something about it (go and use another PC). At least matters are in your own hands.

When a cloud-based suite gets attacked by the gremlins, there's nothing you can do when facing down a business-critical deadline save sit there and keep refreshing the Adobe status page. Or, of course, look for alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud, a topic we discussed in our guide yesterday.

An outage of this length simply isn't acceptable for a service which is as important to users as Creative Cloud, and Adobe better make sure the reputation of its cloud-based service isn't tarnished by another episode like this.