Adobe’s Non-Apology For Deleting Creative Cloud Files

A bug in a recent update to Adobe’s Creative Cloud software led to an unpleasant surprise for a number of users: some of their files and folders were deleted, starting alphabetically. This issue seems to have hit Mac users the hardest, as Apple’s system uses a “.” as the first character in the name of some hidden folders. That dot places those files in front of ones that begin with A, so they were the first to go.

What would cause a system to just start deleting files? Adobe isn’t sure, but the affected users relied on software backup application Backblaze. That means that a number of Mac users found their latest backups gone, and immediately began pointing fingers at Backblaze. That led the data backup company to start running its own tests in Creative Cloud, resulting in the discovery of the bug in Creative Cloud’s latest update.

This is highly annoying stuff, of course, but software bugs in recent updates are so commonplace they’re hardly newsworthy anymore; just ask all the Nest thermostat users who work up to find their units had died during the night and needed to be reset, leaving them without heat. That recent event was traced back to a bug in a December update that caused the batteries in the units to die.

But what is newsworthy–or should be, anyway–is the apparent non-apology from Adobe. The company issued a statement that said, “We were notified that some customers had an issue with an update to the Creative Cloud Desktop application. We removed the update from distribution and deployed a new one which addresses the issue.”

And? No apology? No free months of storage as a show of goodwill? Nothing?

The real danger–apart from all the people who could have potentially lost their jobs when they stood in front of a major presentation audience and their files were missing–is that this kind of glitch is becoming so commonplace that the industry no longer feels the need to make amends. If the current state of software development means customers can’t trust the product but pretty much have to use it anyway due to its widespread market penetration, then the sooner some startups come along and topple the big dogs, the better. At least the smaller guys might apologize for their mistakes.