I do understand the professionals’ position. Optonal licencing methods would be preferable, even for a hobbyist. It’s just nowhere near as critical.
I think it’s worth mentioning that that short outage, which suntower reported at 8pm GMT, and which lasted until 11:30 GMT, did not have any effect on activations on peoples machines.
Maybe Offline Activation could be a worst-case scenario backup. I have no way to experiment with it to discover the ins and out of it since I don’t have a second machine – but let’s say you simultaneously lose internet access and access to your physical hardware, plus your phone and email etc. Maybe you got caught in the act, and your stuff is on the lawn in the rain, say.
Perhaps Offline Activation can provide a backup license one can use in such a catastrophe. It can live a USB flash drive the size of an Elicenser dongle, and if you tape it up so it doesn’t come open. (per usual) it will feel almost like the olden tymes of yore. (And of course you keep it in some other location)
But I’m serious about the idea, maybe someone is inclined to further investigate.
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I think one found all one’s possessions are out on the lawn, one might have bigger fish to fry. 
That said, the original purpose of my rant was (at least partly) to address a ‘services creep’. Although each individual ‘outage’ may seem trivial, at this point, between NI, VSL, Spitfire, Orchestral Tools, SB, iLok, UA, WIBU, et al. I’m probably dependent on -dozens- of vendor schemes to keep my DAW running. And the vast majority of this delicate balance revolves around ‘licensing’.
There’s nowt to be done about it, and I’m on the back nine of my career.
But instead of getting ‘easier’, DAW-world, at least the world where one does not do pre-programmed beats, has only gotten more complex and fiddly, and that’s a bit of a sadness to me.
Absolutely , i think the new licencing system is a case of 'the grass was greener on the other side ’ . These outages could potentially cause a lot of hassle if they happen outside sales times . Admittingly Steinberg do seem to be winning loads of new customers but when they upgraded the servers a while back this should of all be planned for with the volume of sales .
Dual configuration should be allow, Dongle for life time licences if you wish or internet activation for those that love it . PA and WAvEs allows licences on USB
I’ve not investigated this yet, but thanks for the tip … I’ll definitely look into it.
That is the key thing here. If your system was already activated and your software downloaded, it stayed working through the outage. It was only if you needed to log in to Steinberg, download or activate software that you were hit by the outage.
In recent years, the eLicenser servers have been very flaky at times. The period just after a new Cubase release was dreadful. Hopefully, the worst is now behind us as many users have already upgraded to Cubase 12, so their next upgrade will be upgrading a licence that is already on Steinberg Licensing.
Whilst USB eLicenser was robust once your licence was on the dongle, it could be a nightmare getting a licence onto the dongle.
There is no such thing as a perfect licensing system. Every anti-piracy system will ultimately hinder legitimate users at some point and even the biggest companies do have server outages from time to time.
There was something buried somewhere in the Steinberg Licensing timeline about selecting an external vendor. It would not have made sense for Steinberg to “reinvent the wheel” and run their own licensing servers; it is better to use a service that is already commercially available.
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But oh, what fun! 
I kind of miss that … NOT! 