When Adobe announced that future releases of its Creative Suite software would only be released using a subscription-based model, it was completely unsurprising that 61.2% of Consumerist readers told us in a poll that they’ll switch to Creative Cloud when Adobe pulls CS6 out of their cold, dead hard drives. This week, Creative Cloud’s login outage validated our readers’ point of view. Users were unable to switch computers, log in, start new subscriptions, or add services. Some weren’t able to use their programs at all.

This raised an important question for many people who have digital creative jobs: is it really such a good idea to leave so much of their workflow and their destiny in the hands of a single company? “First, and most importantly, we want to apologize 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 said in their statement apologizing for the outage. Calling Adobe programs “critical” to many users is a gross understatement.

“Either I wait it out for Adobe to fix the problem and risk the ire of clients on deadline, or I’ll have to fork out for expensive stand-alone font licenses to use fonts that I’ve already paid Adobe a subscription fee for,” one user complained to The Daily Beast while the outage was ongoing.

Adobe claims that the outage wasn’t related to a hack or other security issue, which is good news after the company suffered from a massive data breach less than a year ago.

Adobe restores Creative Cloud login service after day-long outage [CNET]
Adobe’s ‘Creative Cloud’ Goes Offline—and Takes a Million Designers With It [Daily Beast]

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