Illustrator stuck, all menus are grayed out on macOS

[Fuzzles]

Hey there! I'm learning Illustrator, and towards the end of one of my exercises, I suddenly was very limited in what I could do in the program. I make a lot of mistakes while using hotkeys still so want to be sure I didn't do this myself!

I had just used the shape builder tool to merge some tracing I'd done, and set the fill color to null. Suddenly I am unable to: 

-Save, or use any menus from the top bar. The only options available in any of the menus are "Hide Illustrator" and "Hide Others" from the Illustrator menu. Everything else is greyed out and unselectable, even save. 

-Use tools. I can select them, but cannot use them at all. The "...." at the bottom shows all the tools not on the shortcut bar as greyed out. 

-Zoom

-Turn layer visibility on/off. The layer panel shows objects as off, but nothing changes on the artboard. 

-Select paths/anchors/objects. Using either selection tool I cannot create a selection box or directly select. 

-Change workspace layout. When I select the "Essentials" dropdown everything is greyed out. 

I can still move the tab within the app, and I can still click around and do things with the program responding, so I'm wondering if I hit a hotkey wrong! I have a new MacBook Pro that just arrived this week, so it shouldn't be a hardware problem.

Please let me know! It would be really frustrating to have this happen on a big project, but if anything it's a good lesson to save constantly!

UPDATE: I realized I can use the sidebars to scroll on the page. When I turn on/off layers, the artboard updates whenever I use the scroll bar to move just a little. This must be a bug right??

UPDATE 2: Attempted to close AI, gave me a dialogue box to save. Not sure if it actually saved. AI left open a little dialogue box for a color swatch, cannot close. This was a more common issue I saw when searching for my problem. 

UPDATE 3: Had to force quit the AI app to close the dialogue box, there was no X in the corner and closing via right clicking the icon on the bottom bar did not work. Fortunately, the save when exiting worked fine so I was able to retrieve my work! In case this ever happens again, I'm able to restart without any work being lost and not much hassle, but still not sure if this was a glitch or user error. 

{Renamed by MOD}

[Monika Gause]

What happens when you press the Esc key?

This should get you out of any dialog boxes that you might have opened by accident.

[Fuzzles]

No response or change from the program with Esc key

[Monika Gause]

Can you still make a screenshot and upload to the forum?

[Srishti Bali · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. As Monika mentioned, it would be easy to tell if we could get a screenshot, however, it's definitely not a user error. I hope it never happens again, but please make sure that the files are saved if you are working for long intervals. Also, make sure that the file recovery options are on. For more details, take a look at this document (https://helpx.adobe.com/in/illustrator/using/crash-file-data-recovery.html).

Regards,

Srishti