Adobe CC goes down for 24 hours

[Walter Soyka]

[Walter Soyka] “I’m just pointing out that this was an authentication/service outage, not an application outage.”

Let me clarify further, before I have to defend myself again. I think I’m being terribly unclear here.

1. Not only are outages not good, outages are bad.

2. This outage should not have stopped signed-in apps from functioning. To the extent that creative apps still worked, the no-connectivity fail-safe worked as designed.

3. Adobe should do better. Their customers, me included, count on them.

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] “Rebooting does not sign you out of CC. This is the sort of factual misunderstanding around CC I’m looking to clarify.”

Walter,

We’re miscommunicating. Sign in status was affected by simple things like restarting by some reports. A sample of comments from the ars article:

“It hit me. I had been running Muse pretty much all day, had a couple minor glitches so I quit and tried to restart and was asked to sign in. Of course the sign in didn’t work.
[…]
You didn’t have to log out to get locked out. I merely quit an application (Muse) and when I restarted it moments later it asked me to sign in. …I never log out either.”
User: dlstudios

“I did have a deadline. And yes, I’m locked out of some critical functions. Apparently my authorization cycle ended at an inopportune time.
[…]
We shut everything down for the night and, when we fired everything up this morning, CC wouldn’t login and some programs started started saying our subscription had expired.”
User: SinclairZX81

“This outage had real monetary effects on our company. It is inexcusable.”
User CUclimber

I have trouble reconciling those reports with the judgement that “it doesn’t paint a very good picture of who was actually affected.”

I would hope that there would be some definitive report on who was affected and how. In lieu of such an update, Adobe leave themselves open to a lot of speculation.

I’ll ask again – if anyone knows of a more definitive report of who was affected and how, please post.

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

… some other bits of info via the ars comments (Enterprise & FormsCentral):

“I had forgotten there was an outage until I saw this article. Was using premier and speedgrade yesterday without any problems. We have about 100 copies at work and I haven’t heard of any problems, but we probably wouldn’t have noticed since enterprise customers aren’t normally affected by these problems (adobe has a special set of build tools for enterprise use that disables the DRM/activation).
[…]
Enterprise customers don’t have to worry about outages like this (except for things like cloud storage, or typekit). When you build deployable packages using adobe’s build tool the constant activation requirement is disabled (when the package is built it is authorized during build, after that it never checks in with adobe). If you are a volume customer you generally get a lot of leeway anyway (I can download anything adobe makes legally and don’t have to pay for it until later, and these are the full versions not trial verions).”
User: daishi

“As I mentioned yesterday, the real killer was Forms Central. It’s a forms-hosting service that’s part of the CC package. Not only did the thing go down facing Adobe’s customer, but all the forms hosted on the service were also down on the end-user-facing side. The form creators couldn’t update or edit their forms, which is bad enough, but the creator’s customers couldn’t access, fill out, and submit the already-finished forms. That’s inexcusable. Forms Central is deployed by some pretty major companies. I’d imagine that they’re even more “not happy” than I am.”
User: SinclairZX81

Franz.

[Bret Williams]

FWIW my CC subscription is up at the end of this month. I logged in to cancel and opted to “chat” about any options I might be qualified for. The chat person offered me one free month. “No thanks.” Then he offered another. Hmmm. “No thanks. I have found decent replacements for PS and AI – Pixelmator and iDraw for $30 a pop for life (roughly). But the main app I need is AE, and I find that my CS5 version(s) still function just fine for now.” He didn’t offer a third freebie month.

My plan isn’t to abort Adobe completley. But to utilize other options like iDraw and Pixelmator as much as I can. But if I NEED an adobe app for a project I’ll just pay the $29 for the month. If you look at it that way, renting is a GREAT deal. I’ll go months where FCP X and Motion are all I need.

So I’m going to use this year as a test to see just how much it costs to use Adobe just when I need it. I suggest others do the same if it’s at all feasible. At LEAST go chat with someone and get a month or two free. if everyone were to cancel, then only signup month to month or until they needed it, it might send a message. I’d be happy if they offered half plans. The old production bundle, or the web bundle, etc. $20-30 a month with a yearly contract. With the 2 months free, they still weren’t in that range.

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Franz,

I must plead ignorance about Muse. It was never part of the Creative Suite offering, and I have no idea if it’s in any way different than the other desktop apps in terms of connectivity requirements.

I think the fact that a serious outage occurred is significant, but I also think the fact that the majority of desktop app customers were totally unaffected by it is equally significant in our discussion of Creative Cloud here.

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

[Andrew Kimery]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “I’ll ask again – if anyone knows of a more definitive report of who was affected and how, please post.
“

I don’t think a definitive report will ever come out because there are too many variables. It’s like why does one person’s install of FCP 7 get so corrupt that it has to be erased and re-installed but another person’s doesn’t. Good practice says you should always do fresh installs of new operating systems yet one of my Macs has gone through three upgrade-installs of operations systems (as well as three versions of FCP) and I never ran into any problems.

For me, my computers were off for two weeks while I was out of town. I fired them up yesterday and everything worked fine (though I did get a warning that my CC programs couldn’t connect to the server and I would need to connect successfully some time before August 8th). If it wasn’t for Twitter and the COW I wouldn’t have known there was a big problem.

[Gary Huff]

[Walter Soyka] “Rebooting does not sign you out of CC.”

Nope, definitely rebooted once yesterday, still no issue.