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Adobe Creative Cloud Services Offline (Again?)

Posted by timothy on from the more-moving-parts-to-fail dept.

New submitter jvp (27996) writes "Adobe's authentication system for its Creative Cloud as well as its website services is down, and has been since Wednesday (14 May) afternoon. What this means: If you're a Creative Cloud subscriber, you can't log into your account via the desktop application. Online services such as the fonts are not available. Applications (eg: Photoshop, Premiere, etc) will continue to work. Softpedia has a nice article on it, but their time frames are off quite a bit." As of this writing, a message on the Adobe Creative Cloud page says "Creative Cloud is currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back later. Thank you for your patience." Even though I've come to like some remote-hosted software, like gmail, I don't think I'd want tools for manipulating local media tied even loosely to the uptime of a remote computer (or network connection).

33 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. NO Photoshop for you! by bazmail · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wasn't avoiding the "single point of failure" a large part of the reason for cloud services being pushed in our faces in the first place?

    This is truly a spectacular failure on Adobe's part.

    1. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by jvp · · Score: 5, Informative

      Fortunately, as I pointed out: you can still the CC apps while this debacle is being un-FUBAR'd. That is unless it takes them up to 2 months to fix it, at which point the app will no longer be able to authenticate and validate your subscription. THEN it's "NO Photoshop for you!"

      If it takes them that long to fix this, then they are truly, completely, and absolutely incompetent...

      --
      Jason Van Patten
    2. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wasn't avoiding the "single point of failure" a large part of the reason for cloud services being pushed in our faces in the first place? This is truly a spectacular failure on Adobe's part.

      The Cloud can NEVER fail. NEVER I tell you! Only we can fail the cloud.

      Software as a service has only one thing to recommend it. When it fails, just like it has here, you'll have someone else to blame it on. Of course your boss might not believe you, since he or she has been sold on the cloud and all it emcompasses is the zenith of civilization, the first thing mainkind has ever designed that is fail safe, and will never ever have a problem.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    3. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Probably not. Few people want to migrate to less-capable software. Learning new software is only worthwhile if the new software is more capable than the software you're currently familiar with.

    4. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by rduncan10 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not all CC apps will work. If you have, for example, used CC fonts in an InDesign document, you won't be able view them properly or publish the document if you can't sign into CC.

    5. Re: NO Photoshop for you! by tbuddy · · Score: 3, Informative

      If today was the day you needed to revalidate you'll be having some hassles, though. 60 days is only if you got in for a year at a time, also.

    6. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by Dogtanian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wasn't avoiding the "single point of failure" a large part of the reason for cloud services being pushed in our faces in the first place?

      No, that was only the rationale used to justify it to Photoshop users. The *reason* for it in many cases- such as this one- is quite obviously to increase software companies' control over users, and to get them used to a subscription model that provides those companies with a continuous income stream, rather than having the hassle of creating upgraded versions of software (gratuitous or otherwise (*)) and then having to convince users to pay for that upgrade when they might not feel the need for it.

      That's not to say that cloud computing (i.e. distributed computing and distributed storage) is a bad idea in itself; of course, it has many theoretical benefits. But the concept has been co-opted and distorted by marketing, who have reduced the meaning of "cloud" to little more than a buzzword that applies to anything with online connectivity, even if that's not designed in a cloud-like way. And they've used that to make a method of control a selling point- or at least to try to sweeten the pill Photoshop users are being forced to swallow (**).

      Really, what major cloud-like benefit does the latest Photoshop offer users? Does it let them harness the enormous power of a distributed computer network to massively speed up processing times on slow operations (vs. doing it on their own computer) in short bursts?

      (*) Canonical example, Microsoft Word, which reached what most people needed several versions ago, but had to force upgrades to keep it selling, so kept adding new features, which also force other users who want to interoperate with those using the latest versions to *also* upgrade.
      (**) Along the lines of (*) above, while some may argue that "you don't *have* to upgrade", those in industry who wish to interoperate with others and keep up with latest developments probably *will* need to upgrade eventually

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
    7. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by Xaedalus · · Score: 2

      Have to second this--while there is such a thing as "Sound" cloud architecture, it exists only in theory because it's astronomically expensive to put into practice, enormously difficult to keep going, and (here's the killer) completely fails to account for human stupidity. To get metaphorical: Amazon is the best at cloud architecture because they've got massive amounts of RAID arrays on steroids, but they cannot account for human stupidity and/or ignorance. Most cloud providers run on a far less complex set-up of RAID arrays with tape backups. They basically run a mainframe in a cost effective manner, and have traded a certain amount of risk in exchange. This means they *will* go down at some point, despite their claims to the contrary, because they are running a mainframe system. And all systems fail.

      --
      Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
    8. Re:NO Photoshop for you! by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >is quite obviously to increase software companies' control over users

      No, it only increases Adobe's control over their own software. This does not give them control over you. You can still do pretty much whatever you want with yourself or your own property.

      >and to get them used to a subscription model that provides those companies with a continuous income stream

      Of course. Do you somehow believe that companies should not be able to determine their own business-model? The fact that Adobe once offered an unlimited license to their software was their choice at the time. It didn't entitle you to anything regarding their future business.

  2. The best part... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Informative

    The best part is that this is happening on the eve of Adobe canceling sales of perpetual licensing to Adobe Creative Suite products. If you are a volume license customer, you will no longer be able to buy ANYTHING BUT Creative Cloud as of June 1; and you get to pay Adobe every month whether they update anything or not as expense rather than capital purchase.

    Hooray for not having competition?

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    1. Re:The best part... by jvp · · Score: 2

      The best part is that this is happening on the eve of Adobe canceling sales of perpetual licensing to Adobe Creative Suite products

      I attached a comment to this article before it was posted, but it looks like timothy nuked it before he made it live.

      This "sniff test" for this is: hack. Not maintenance. I say that because the authentication system went down, as best I can tell, around 1700EST Wednesday. Afternoon maintenance is not unheard of, but it seems like a silly and unlikely thing to do.

      Hope I'm wrong about that.

      --
      Jason Van Patten
    2. Re:The best part... by realmolo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The thing is, if you are heavily tied to Adobe products, paying $50/month to ALWAYS have the latest version is actually a good deal, from a usability perspective. Adobe likes to change/abandon file formats with every upgrade, and that causes issues. If you always have the newest version, you don't have to worry about that.

      You're right, though: Adobe has no competition. But that isn't Adobe's fault. For all the screwy-ness of Adobe's software, they are STILL better than any of the alternatives, and basically always have been. They "won" their market legitimately.

    3. Re:The best part... by HangingChad · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure that Adobe has had this in the works for over a decade now

      I'm sure you're right. Just amazing too how customers, who might have otherwise used the same version of software for five or six years, suddenly warmed up to the idea of paying $600 a year, every year, year after year, and not really getting much in return for it. The video editors dropping Premiere is more than a minority. Sony and Avid have been gratefully accepting that new business. Since Apple tanked FCP with FCPX that leaves Avid, Vegas and a couple others to take up the slack.

      This might be Corel's opportunity to kick up the functionality in PaintShop Pro.

      --
      That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
    4. Re:The best part... by timothy · · Score: 2

      Unfortunately, the comments attached to stories in the firehose don't stick when it's promoted / converted into a story on the Slashdot page. So, no nuking required (or intended), just a bit of a crufty system.

      timothy

      --
      jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
    5. Re:The best part... by WillAdams · · Score: 2

      It's nice that there are alternatives for some of the apps, but things don't look so good for other apps:

        - InDesign --- Quark still hasn't caught back up, and Scribus is painful to use, w/ bizarre feature limitations --- I use LyX and xelatex (and moving to lualatex) instead, but not many people are willing to do that
        - Illustrator --- I'd rather have FreeHand, but still find Illustrator more capable than Corel Draw and Inkscape
        - PhotoShop --- fortunately, these are just pixel files, so anything will work, but the blunt truth is, if one is billing by the hour, you're probably leaving money on the table if you're not using PhotoShop

      &c.

      --
      Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
    6. Re:The best part... by Solandri · · Score: 2

      The thing is, if you are heavily tied to Adobe products, paying $50/month to ALWAYS have the latest version is actually a good deal, from a usability perspective.

      That's true if you were always using the latest version. I usually skipped a version or two before upgrading though. That lowered my monthly amortized cost for the software to considerably below the CC monthly fees.

      I haven't yet decided what I'll do. Ever since I bought Lightroom, I haven't used Photoshop anywhere near as much. But when I use it, it's because I really need it. Adobe's answer is that I should pay for a month of PS when I happen to need it. But sometimes all I need it for is to make a 5 second change to some work I'd previously done. It'd really stick in my craw to have to pay for a month just for that. I suspect I'll just toss CS6 onto a virtual machine and keep it around forever, rather than suffer artificial editing emergencies caused by Adobe's licensing demands.

      FWIW, I have encountered a problem at a remote location without Internet, where I had to system restore and it undid the activation of my CS3 installation. The only other option I had would've been to make a long-distance call to Adobe to manually activate it. Fortunately I'd been anal and kept a virtual machine image of my previous laptop around, which happened to have PS CS1 on it. So this sort of stuff could happen pre-CC too. It's more a matter of degrees rather than a binary good/bad. Except VMs - those are always good to have around.

  3. Why do people put up with this shit? by the_humeister · · Score: 2

    Most people will never learn.

    1. Re:Why do people put up with this shit? by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 2

      Point to a viable, professional grade option.

      Please note the "professional grade" portion of that request.

      for the proprietary camp you have Corel with painter, paintshop, corel draw, video studio, corel cad, word perfect and whatever their pdf editing software is called.
      for open source, you have gimp, inkscape, blender,

      --
      ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
  4. Adobe Photoshop Down by stenvar · · Score: 2

    As of this writing, a sticky note on your local computer says "Windows is currently undergoing maintenance. The drive was infected by a virus you caught from an Adobe Photoshop plugin and needs to be wiped completely. We're trying to recover as much of your data as possible" Even though I've come to like some locally-hosted software, like TextEdit, I don't think I'd want tools for manipulating local media tied even loosely to the uptime of my local computer (or Windows), or endanger my Windows installation by installing anything other than completely minimal software on it.

    (Of course, Adobe Create Cloud may still suck and make you dependent on complex local and remote software, but cloud services in general have been a big win, at least for me.)

    1. Re:Adobe Photoshop Down by tbuddy · · Score: 2

      I don't see how it could possibly be a win for anyone unless they only use the product a couple months out of the year and end up paying less than perpetual licenses. They failed on their file storage for the better part of a year, forced their type syncing garbage into apps if you don't use it, give out useless junk like Behance that is of no use to people who aren't looking to pimp a portfolio, and have added zero useful features that merit paying every month for it.

      The only audience I can think this is good for is students, freelancers, and unemployed seeking an audience to showcase their work who can't build a proper portfolio or interview well.

  5. Cloud Services are the FUTURE! by argStyopa · · Score: 2

    Hype/

    Why isn't everyone migrating to the cloud? Cloud apps are fantastic! They enable collaboration! Everything's great! Join the Cloud or be a dinosaur!"
    . /hype

    Steam is about the only cloud service that is reasonably adequate, and that's because if a game isn't available, it's not that big a deal.

    But for work-critical software? If you are "in the cloud" you're gambling with your livelihood.

    --
    -Styopa
    1. Re:Cloud Services are the FUTURE! by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      For all of you who take your cue from the Adobe marketing team, the moniker "Creative Cloud" is really a misnomer. Yes, the applications have to hit the authentication servers - every 90 days or so. The applications are run locally. The only thing that is 'cloudlike' is Adobe's 'Behance' service which is a store, a Dropbox wannabe and a typeface collection.

      It's a dick move and one that benefits Adobe rather than Adobe's customers (amazing ...), but it's Not The End Of The World.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  6. for those who do not speak native Adobe by nimbius · · Score: 2

    Creative Cloud is currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back later. Thank you for your patience.

    "Creative Moneytrain is, as are all your documents and immediately concerning projects, dead in the water for what you may as well assume is indefinitely. Check back now, or later, or whenever and it might be randomly back up. Thank you for patiently accepting the fact that we as a corporation to which you have gladly provided 4.4 billion dollars in revenue do not now, nor have we ever cared about what it is that concerns you regarding our products or services. please piddle around angrily in Gimp until your overwhelming frustration and lack of attention span sends you galloping back to our cold teat."

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  7. Worst Case Scenario = War by BoRegardless · · Score: 2

    What happens when the intercontinental Internet goes down because of War or other cataclysmic event?

    The history of both the Earth and mankind says these events will happen.

    At that point, how do companies and countries continue functioning "when the cable gets cut?"

    1. Re:Worst Case Scenario = War by tbuddy · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. In the event of a catastrophic event that could upset the lives of millions where will my InDesign layouts. When I rise from my bunker I'm going to still have trusty CS6 and those Creative Cloud subscribers are going to starve.

    2. Re:Worst Case Scenario = War by opusbuddy · · Score: 2

      That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. In the event of a catastrophic event that could upset the lives of millions where will my InDesign layouts. When I rise from my bunker I'm going to still have trusty CS6 and those Creative Cloud subscribers are going to starve.

      Ever since I had to upgrade from OS/X 10.6, CS6 has become increasingly unstable. Under Lion and Mountain Lion it now crashes daily and Adobe has stopped putting out updates except for ACR, for which it seems like every time they put out a new version to support more cameras, they go and change the UI yet again on me. I have yet to find a good mix of OPENGL and font settings that make it at all behave. Fortunately, I have a rock solid fallback--Photoshop 7 (which ran GREAT under Windoze XP, and hasn't suffered too badly under 7).

      --
      If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
  8. no library e-books while authentication servers ar by iamscottevil · · Score: 2

    I tried to download some e-books from my library website, adobe digital editions is dead while this the authentication system is down, so can't read any e-books. Another disappointment courtesy DRM.

  9. library e-books fail to work while adobe is down by iamscottevil · · Score: 5, Informative

    I tried to download some e-books from my library website, adobe digital editions is dead while this the authentication system is down, so can't get any e-books. And it's been more than a day without any explanation. Another disappointment courtesy DRM.

  10. current status by iamscottevil · · Score: 2

    https://status.creativecloud.c... authentication is still down

  11. WoW! by jeff13 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Damn you Blizzard! I pay a subscription, you're down again and... oh wait. nm

  12. I didn't even notice. by SocialEngineer · · Score: 2

    I work as a graphic and web designer, and I live in Photoshop and Illustrator. We don't utilize Typekit, or the cloud storage, so it didn't really affect us here at the office.

    As long as I can still do my job, I'm fine. I'm not a HUGE fan of CC's monthly sub, but the cost/benefit ratio can be insanely beneficial if you HAVE the money for the monthly fee. Now, for my freelance work? Forget it. I'm still using CS2 at home, and don't see it changing right now unless I come into a huge chunk of change.

    --
    "Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
  13. This is why CS 6 will hang around forever by sandbagger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Creative Suite 6 will become Adobe's XP. Solid enough that no-one ever really needs to upgrade and expose themselves to cloud evaporations.

    --
    ---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
  14. This shit's been going off-line weekly for a while by pecosdave · · Score: 2

    I support a bunch of creative types on Macs mostly for a living, as a sys-admin, IT-know it and do-it-all. This shits been going down several times a week for the past couple of months. Usually no more than fifteen minutes to an hour at a time, but it's really easy to miss most of the time. Unless you're actively setting up new systems or inviting new users to teams your shit just keeps working and you don't notice. To say the least it's made me look like a fool more than once.

    Can't login? Well do the little password reset thing. What? It says your user and password aren't right? Let me verify I've got you setup right.

    Uhmm, I can't login either. I'm sure it's the right password.

    Hey, can you login over there?

    -- I don't like being made to look like a fool. The fact these bozo's have been doing it a couple of times a week recently is annoying.

    What's even worse is I'm a Linux guy. I prefer using the Gimp and other FOSS stuff over what I'm supporting anyways.

    --
    The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.