Yesterday was a bit of a disaster for Adobe, as the company’s online services fell victim to a global outage lasting more than 24 hours.

Adobe first admitted that its customers were locked out of it’s Creative Cloud suite via a tweet at 2.22pm PT on Wednesday. It was still offline some 24 hours later, only coming back online just before the close of business on Thursday.

While it was still possible to work on Creative Cloud apps that had already been downloaded to the local hard drive, any need to interface with the cloud — for TypeKit fonts, syncing and sharing, or the FormCentral service — was not possible.

Adobe issued a statement saying the following:

“Adobe login is currently offline, impacting access to some Adobe services. We apologize for the disruption. We have identified the cause and are working to restore the service as quickly as possible. We will share updates on Twitter at @AdobeCare.”

Such a lengthy period of downtime is a major embarrassment for Adobe, which has given its customers no option other than its cloud-based subscription model. The company decided to do away with boxed versions of its Creative Suite last year, and since then programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and InDesign have only been available to purchases as online ‘subscription services’.

Adobe might be capable of building some of the best creative tools in the industry, but it’s failed to demonstrate the same level of acumen when it comes to the cloud. Previously, Adobe’s cloud storage service was unable to sync user files for two entire weeks. Then last October, Adobe was hit by a serious data breach that saw as many as 38 million user’s encrypted passwords leaked.

Adobe’s System Status page revealed that users were denied access to a wide range of services, including the Creative Cloud desktop app, cloud file sync and downloads, access to user profiles, administration, purchases, and upgrades. The good news is the page now reports that all systems are operational, so it looks like the outage has been fixed.

photo credit: Wolfram Burner via photopin cc