Adobe apologises after outage outrage

Service resumed on cloud services which were out for 24 hours

Adobe has moved to calm customer anger after some of its services went down for an entire day earlier this week.

The outage affected its Creative Cloud offerings and was down to a database-maintenance issue, it said in a blog post in which it apologised to customers.

The vendor has been pushing its cloud-only model over the past year – upsetting some small businesses which claimed the ongoing subscription model was too expensive for them.

Last month Adobe resellers braced themselves for a rebate cut on the subscription-based offerings and said the vendor's cloud focus reflects a growing anti-channel attitude from Adobe.

The outage sparked outrage from users who took to Twitter to vent their concerns.

"Absolutely disgusted by Adobe today. How can this be allowed to happen? As partners we need answers," tweeted Tom Edwards.

Other users branded the outage "ridiculous", arguing it highlighted the problem of relying on the cloud.

Adobe admitted its service fell short of customers' expectations.

"We understand that the time it took to restore service has been frustrating, but we wanted to be as thorough as possible," it said. "We have identified the root cause of this failure and are putting standards in place to prevent this from happening again.

"We are aware that we didn't meet your expectations (or ours) today. For this, we apologise. Thanks for bearing with us as we worked to resolve this – and know that we will do better."