I had a client who was experiencing Adobe InDesign 2019 crashing a few seconds after opening it. . It did not matter what file they were working with. I created a brand new file and within a few seconds of trying to draw with the Pen tool, InDesign would close out and crash. This was happening on a brand new iMac, with High Sierra and Adobe Creative Cloud.

I could not recreate the problem on my laptop which is a MacBook Pro with Mojave and I am using the same version of Creative Cloud/InDesign as my client.

I soon Googled and then searched Twitter and found that multiple people were having the same issue. I figured at that point it was probably an issue with the activation servers that the software uses to call home every once in a while.

Just the fact that the software is calling home so much and a mistake on one of Adobe’s server can cause such a large issue is very concerning. Especially when you’re paying these guys hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month to borrow their software. The last they could do is get it right.

According to this forum post from an Adobe staff member by the name of Steve, the issue was a server on Adobe’s end, which I guessed correctly: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2581509.

Per the thread, things should be fixed. We’ll see.