Adobe Customer Care initially notified users of the login problem via twitter at 2:22pm (PDT) on 14 May, when it said: "We're currently experiencing an outage affecting user's ability to sign in to our services. We are working on a fix- stay tuned."

It wasn't until 10:26am (PDT) on 15 May that Adobe tweeted that it had identified the cause of the problem and it was another seven hours before the software developer reported that the outage had been resolved.

Adobe later issued a mea culpa in the form of a blog post, which said: "Several Adobe services were down or unreachable for many of you over the last 24 hours. The failure happened during database maintenance activity and affected services that require users to log in with an Adobe ID.

"First, and most importantly, 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. 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. We are aware that we didn’t meet your expectations (or ours) today. For this, we apologize. Thanks for bearing with us as we worked to resolve this – and know that we will do better."

The service outage is the first major failure of the Creative Cloud since its launch two years ago; however, many will see it as evidence of the dangers of having business critical software applications based in the cloud.

Fortunately for printers, the outage only affected services that require users to log into their Creative Cloud account and should not have prevented users from accessing applications such as InDesign, which are downloaded from the cloud on purchase and installed locally.