Acrobat dc will not work offline

I have had the same issue and have been working with Adobe support for many months trying to obtain an answer from them. First, they DO NOT UNDERSTAND THEIR OWN LICENSE MECHANISM.   I operate in an environment where being on a network continuously is not permitted.  

Observation and possibly SOLVED

Signed in does not mean what we think. It is a license authenticator. If you login to start Acrobat DC it will of course start when you log in as requested.  But once you have done this you can shut down your machine and restart without a network connection and Acrobat will still be fully functional. It is the act of logging out from acrobat  that apparently forces the license request.  So as long as you don't intentionally logout of the app it will work without a network connection and therefore is NOT actually connected to the network.  I cannot say that if you are reconnected to a network that it is not reseablishing a connection without a request to you.  I discoverd this through experimentation. As commented by others here it may periodically require a connection to refresh a  use timer.  This does not imply that the system when it does require a connection is not transferring data to ADOBE that is sensitive to your organization and therefore you must determine the level of risk.   I am continuing to examine how long the license will operate without a refresh of the authentication.  This is the first observed method I have done that allows us to operate in a non-connected environment such as aircraft or secure facility.

Diatribe: I have without satisfaction been given multiple answers by Adobe for the last year. They have suggested that I buy the full standard license and obtain a key. I have done this, and, in each case, it did not solve the problem. They have in each case at the end said that’s the only way it works after spending hours on the line and being passed from one group to another and having to start over and explain my need again and again is ONLINE.  Each time they simply offered a refund at the end.  I finally download it one more time from my online subscription, the online still allows a fully standalone installation as well as their cloud service. After installing on a laptop and tried experimenting with AIRPLANE mode and discovered the characteristic above.

I don’t know if this solves the problem in all cases but at least I can get a connection to authorize the device periodically and then be disconnected to do our work.  

OS: Windows 10

Acrobat DC loaded on PC “NOT” Creative Cloud.

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The Acrobat program that you install on your computer SHOULD allow you to work offline as long as you have not gone beyond the validation time (I think that is 30 days)

I have never heard of a program subscription with a quarterly payment schedule

If you actually have the Cloud PDF service, I think you have to be logged in to use the service

https://community.adobe.com/t5/Document-Cloud-PDF-Services/bd-p/document-cloud-pdf-services

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC is free. Do you actually have Adobe Acrobat Pro DC?