Designers forced to sit on their hands for 24 hours watching deadlines whoosh by.
If you've had trouble logging into Adobe's Creative Cloud in the last couple of days then you're by no means alone.
The login servers for the subscription service - which allow access to Adobe's suite of creative applications including Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC - were down for more than 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday.
What worked, what didn't
It was still possible during the outage to work using applications such as Photoshop CC which had been downloaded to your hard drive. But the main advantages that the cloud subscription model offers - including syncing your files between machines, sharing work on Behance, and using TypeKit fonts - were no longer available.
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Adobe did its best to suggest workarounds in the following statement: "While the outage continues you can open your Creative Cloud applications successfully, and utilize the software in trial mode. If your trial mode has expired... you will be able to utilize your Creative Cloud applications in a bonus launch state."
However, it also admitted: "If your bonus launch has expired then you will be unable to utilize the Creative Cloud applications on your current computer until the outage is complete."
The aftermath
The good news is that service seems to be back up now, according to a short statement which appears on Adobe's blog, which reads in full:
"We want to apologize for the disruption in some Adobe services, which went down or were unreachable for many of you over the last 24 hours. The failure happened during database maintenance activity and affected services that required users to log in with an Adobe ID. Please visit our Adobe Care blog for more details."
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Not unexpectedly, designers have been blogging and tweeting furiously about their frustration with the breakdown in service and apparent lack of Plan B on Adobe's behalf.
While others without Creative Cloud subscriptions said the outage had confirmed their suspicions of the Cloud-based model:
So how was it for you? Did the outage mean you upset clients or got behind on a project? Or did you just use it as a welcome excuse to spend the day in the pub?
We'd love to hear from anyone who was affected, and whether it's made you reassess whether you continue to subscribe to Adobe's CC apps. Let us know in the comments or email us at contact@creativebloq.com with your thoughts.
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
