For those who somehow missed the news, Adobe’s Creative Cloud service self-destructed on Thursday for nearly 24 hours, bringing down a significant portion of the creative world with it. This morning we’re beginning to hear just what this outage has meant around the world.
Perhaps the highest profile victim so far has been the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, which had to scrap its digital edition, Mail Plus, entirely. Bye bye ad revenues for Thursday.
For those wanting to know exactly how the problems manifested themselves, this CNET article will give you the particulars. LinkedIn contact Philip Byrne tracked down this workaround should the exact same problem happen again (cheers for that, Philip).
But that’s just it: Adobe may well patch up this problem, but another will appear – it’s the nature of the Web. Between the complexity of network connections, updates, hackers and viruses, it’s not a question of if this will happen again, only when.
Naturally the disruption gave those still fuming over Adobe’s forced exodus to the cloud nearly a year ago more reasons to fume. Even a few of the “business is business” types who defended the company’s move last year were sounding a little peeved on Twitter today.
Adobe’s response, perhaps best characterized as perfunctorily contrite, did little to reassure users:
“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 a statement Thursday night. “We understand that the time it took to restore service has been frustrating, but we wanted to be as thorough as possible. We have identified the root cause of this failure and are putting standards in place to prevent this from happening again.”
Sure, it doesn’t matter much if hundreds of sole-proprietors grumble and complain, but money types at large corporations – the ones Adobe actually cares about – are not going to be pleased by a problem that hits them in the checkbook. And the next time things go wonky in the cloud, they may well look to alternative platforms that actually give you the option of having your software on disc.
After all, business is business.
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The Backstory on the Creative Cloud Controversy
