Adobe Marketo experienced a significant outage lasting a day and a half in 2026, disrupting services for customers including a missed newsletter send to over 450,000 subscribers. The platform also had a broken unsubscribe link for more than two weeks, raising compliance concerns. Despite these issues, Adobe proposed a 20% price increase for the following year, according to saastr.com.
The problems unfolded as Adobe Marketo's downtime prevented a scheduled newsletter dispatch, an irreversible loss for the affected company. Attempts to resolve the unsubscribe link issue were unsuccessful for weeks, with Adobe's engineering team initially deflecting blame onto Salesforce and the customer. The vendor did not provide clear commitments to fix the problems promptly, highlighting a breakdown in customer support and service reliability.
This incident underscores broader challenges in the B2B SaaS market, where legacy providers face criticism not solely due to AI disruption but also due to declining service quality and customer care. The Adobe Marketo case exemplifies how operational failures and poor client relations can damage trust, even as software pricing rises. It reflects a trend where SaaS companies risk losing clients by neglecting core service expectations amid competitive pressures.
The outage and subsequent customer service issues with Adobe Marketo were detailed in a July 2026 report by saastr.com, which also noted the vendor’s intention to increase prices by 20% despite the service failures.