Adobe Creative Cloud outage locks customers out of services

Routine maintenance triggered a global service outage across Adobe's Creative Cloud offering over the weekend, as enraged users found themselves locked out of their apps for more than 24 hours.

The company has been quick to hose down any suspicions of a security breach however, blaming the malfunction on "database maintenance activity [which] affected services that require users to log in wiht an Adobe ID".

No further detail was given by Adobe about the fault. The software vendor said it has identified the root cause and is putting in place standards to prevent it 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."

Adobe Customer Care

Users were unable to log into Adobe's Creative Cloud on Friday Australian time, with the fault persisting until Saturday.

#Adobe authentication is currently down. Don't close @creativecloud or you will not be able to log in. Stay tuned we will keep you updated.

— Storycode (@storycode) May 14, 2014

We know we let you down. We apologize and are working to ensure it doesn't happen again.

— Adobe Customer Care (@AdobeCare) May 16, 2014

The company decided to kill of its Creative Suite set of products a year ago, in favour of a cloud-based subscription model starting at A$50 a month for individuals, and also featuring 20GB of storage.

Adobe's eagerness to dispel any notion that the outage was caused by a breach is explained by its chequered history when it comes to security.

A 2012 slip-up saw attackers grab usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for over 150,000 users when one of Adobe's support forums was hacked.

In October last year, a data breach at Adobe exposed the credentials of up to 38 million customers, who had their passwords reset by the company. Customers' credit and debit card data was also accessed, along with the source code for some Adobe products in what is thought to be one of the largest data breaches of recent history.

Its popular Flash Player software has also suffered from several vulnerabilities over the years and continues to be targeted by attackers.