I will probably be torched as a heretic, but here goes...
'Cloud' is very in these days, but it's largely meaningless.
What has happened is that some central system has gone tits-up.
Since the earliest days of computing, the 'eggs' have been placed in one central basket. We didn't even get round to having actual computers on desks until decades after the computing revolution began. The only novelty about 'cloud systems' is that the owner of the equipment may not be you, and it's easier to alter utilisation patterns to suit load, but Adobe are hardly the first company to have a central service upon which many people rely and which ought to be designed and managed in such a way to avoid This Sort Of Thing (tm).
Leaving aside the business pros and cons of having a subscription model rather than an upgrade model (and that is a business issue, not a technology issue), Adobe's business relied on central systems before subscription and it will afterwards, as will hospitals, banks, the Government, scientific institutes - the whole economy. This episode simply underlines the importance of reliability of a central system. It doesn't invalidate the model in any way, not even for software licensing.
The issue they should concentrate on is how things failed, what to do about it to meet SLAs (if they have such a thing!), and perhaps a better contingency plan for things going tits-up next time.
As we're talking about software licensing and not air traffic control, a very simple contingency plan could have been simply to allow everyone to use the software for free while the system was in 'degraded' mode. It wouldn't be difficult to do.
For better or worse - and I accept that many people find it worse - Adobe have restructured their business so that they are not reliant on spiky cashflow that comes from occasional upgrade patterns of purchasing. They could have stuck to physical installed licences to drive that business model, but in this instance, they've used an online strategy, for obvious reasons. The online strategy is not the thing that is broken. You may not like the business model, but the thing that is broken here is merely the implementation, and they are not exactly the first to suggest a lot of people rely on a central service which ought not to go wrong...