Adobe CC goes down for 24 hours

[Mitch Ives]

FWIW, this isn’t limited to CC. Using a legitimately owned copy of CS, I once had it mysteriously announce that my trial had expired. What trial… I bought it… I’m holding the discs in my hand with a serial number. Any attempt at reinstalling informed that I had already used all my installs. You know, maybe someday an installer could be smart enough to see that it’s the same machine, same hard drive ID, etc? Is that asking too much?

Under deadline, I had to pay another facility to use their suite, since Adobe couldn’t do anything when I called them.

Afterwards, Adobe… I mean India, came up with a bailing wire and duct tape solution that involved a secret key command that popped up a hidden window, to which they had me type in an answer to a challenge question. This tricks the CS suite into letting it launch. This wasn’t a permanent fix. More akin to placing a band-aid over cancer. It appears to look like a fix, but the underlying problem still exists.

Eventually I upgraded the CS suite to the last “real” version and got a new serial number and escaped this hell. Now, with CC, you can’t even do that…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Walter Soyka]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “Herb, I think it was a bit more serious. arstechnica reported it as this…”

Franz, the headline for this story could have been “Adobe authentication outage lasts 24 hours; nearly 2 million subscribers don’t even notice because their apps keep working as designed.”

However, that headline is:
1) too long
2) not incendiary enough to inspire page clicks, and
3) inconsistent with the subscription-is-bad narrative.

I don’t mean to blindly defend Adobe, but I think we are losing real-world context for how the outage affected (or didn’t affect) CC customers.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Timothy Auld]

[Walter Soyka] “I think we are losing real-world context for how the outage affected (or didn’t affect) CC customers.”

Then it’s all good…unless of course you’re not among those lucky enough not to be affected.

Tim

[Walter Soyka]

[TImothy Auld] “Then it’s all good…unless of course you’re not among those lucky enough not to be affected.”

Not saying it’s all good — just saying that “those affected” are a small group, but smaller than you’d think from reading these discussions.

Really, I’m not trying to defend Adobe here. This is exactly the kind of outage that cannot happen if you want people to trust your subscription offering. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and there should have been a backup plan in place (other than “run as a trial”).

But I think we should keep the discussion factual. CC does not require constant authentication or connectivity to function. CC has a grace period (99 days for annual subscribers, 30 for monthly) that allows the apps to keep running if they cannot connect or authenticate. In this regard, the system widely worked as designed, keeping nearly two million creatives truckin’ — despite the outage.

The Great Dropbox Outage of 2014 (three hours in January) was a bigger problem for my business than this was. I’m a CC customer, and I wouldn’t have even known this outage occurred if the non-CC customers all over Twitter and the COW hadn’t brought it up. From what I can tell, you were really only affected by this outage if you tried to sign out and back in.

As a very similar scenario could have unfolded with CS6 if the activation servers had gone down, we need to be careful about framing this as a subscription-only issue.

All that said, even though as a CC customer, I was able to work all day yesterday without interruption — I hope that Adobe learns from this and gets a better backup plan in place.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Walter Soyka] “… I think we are losing real-world context for how the outage affected (or didn’t affect) CC customers.”

Walter,

I posted the link for that very reason (because I wasn’t affected and I did not know who was).

From the link (headline aside) it was clearer to me who actually was affected (potentially anyone not currently signed in, whose trial launches failed, and who couldn’t access “bonus” launches).

I don’t find the headline all that sensational, but I wouldn’t object to a more precise one.

If you have better info on who was affected, please post.

Franz.

[Walter Soyka]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “From the link (headline aside) it was clearer to me who actually was affected (potentially anyone not currently signed in, whose trial launches failed, and who couldn’t access “bonus” launches).”

My point was that it is not a normal state to be “not signed in.” That’s like being de-activated on CS6, so while the article is informative, I don’t think it paints a very good picture of who was actually affected.

I don’t have numbers, but would be glad to see them.

I can only say that anecdotally, the people I see protesting the outage are not CC subscribers.

Again, not a defense. That outage shouldn’t have happened. Just context for understanding the ramifications of the outage.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Walter Soyka] “My point was that it is not a normal state to be “not signed in. …I don’t think it paints a very good picture of who was actually affected.””

Walter,

That’s really an odd judgement. There are many reason why you would have to reboot any given system.

If you read the comments on the ars article, two things are clear:
– there are very few comments from people who were actually affected
– those affected were affected catastrophically – it shut them down.

I’m surprised that you would judge those affected somehow negatively (your post has a “blame the victim” ring to it), rather than looking to the cause.

Again, I’d be interested in a clearer picture of who was actually affected by this – if you have better info, please post.

Franz.

[Jeremy Garchow]

It was an rip out and install day for me where I couldn’t access a current account, couldn’t create a new account, and I was ready to buy more accounts.

Things happen. I couldn’t download Office, and I couldn’t watch Netflix while waiting for the Internet to unscrew itself.

Although, today is a much better day.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

… some more info at PCWorld:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2155621/adobe-creative-cloud-suffering-extended-outage.html

“4:00 P.M Eastern time, the Creative Cloud status page shows that desktop applications and files, fonts, and settings sync are now down as well. Every major Creative Cloud function is offline.”

In other words, those few actual “cloud” aspects of Creative Cloud (files, fonts, sync) appeared to have been non-functional during the outage as well.

Franz.

[Walter Soyka]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “That’s really an odd judgement. There are many reason why you would have to reboot any given system.”

Rebooting does not sign you out of CC.

This is the sort of factual misunderstanding around CC I’m looking to clarify.

[Franz Bieberkopf] “I’m surprised that you would judge those affected somehow negatively (your post has a “blame the victim” ring to it), rather than looking to the cause.”

I certainly don’t intend to blame the victims, and I have no intention of defending a 24-hour service outage. I’m just pointing out that this was an authentication/service outage, not an application outage.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events