Adobe says sorry for Creative Cloud outage

Customers were unable to log-in for over 24 hours

Adobe, known for its Reader and Acrobat software, has apologised to customers of its Creative Cloud, after the online service suffered an outage which stopped users from being able to log-in for over 24 hours.

Creative Cloud is Adobe's subscription service for businesses or professionals using its Photoshop, Premiere Pro and other products. It runs on desktops but accesses some services over the cloud.

The failure, which has now been fixed, was due to database maintenance, Adobe said in a blog.

It apologised for the outage and claimed that it knows "how disruptive it has been to those who felt the impact" - customers who had already been logged in were not affected.

"We understand that the time it took to restore the service has been frustrating, but we wanted to be as thorough as possible," the firm stated.

The firm said that it had identified the "root cause of the failure" and is putting standards in place to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Last year Adobe stopped selling its Creative Suite product for a cloud version of the software - this meant that enterprises would have to pay subscription charges of around £45 per month rather than a one-off £2,000 licence fee. The move, similar to Microsoft's with Office 365, is seen as an effort by the company to thwart piracy.

Last year, the company suffered a cyber-attack which impacted 38 million users. The attack enabled attackers to retrieve the private information of customers, including their names, encrypted credit card and debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other data relating to customers' orders.