I've been having this problem periodically. I've found that if I click my mouse outside of the program (onto the desktop or on my dual screen) and then click back. The hand tool disappears and I am able to use the other tools again. I hope this is helpful.

Same thing here : quit Safari

Quitting Safari worked for me. As soon as I did the hand tool immediately started working again in Illustrator, and at least for now, continues to work after relaunching Safari. Weird bug, I have no idea why they should be related.

I just had this issue it the problem only occurs when I turn on Dictation in Accessibility.

Yup, closed Safari (and later reopened) and everything works fine now.

I SOLVED THIS ISSUE 3 DIFFERENT TIMES ---------- BY DOING A SAFE RESTART:

Restart the Macintosh. Press and hold the Shift key immediately after you hear the startup tone.
Release the Shift key when the Apple logo appears.

Before this, I just limped along when the grabber function would go out, and then after a day, or an hour, or some other random amount of time and activity, the space bar as grabber function would return. But doing this safe restart worked for me 3 times now.

Not sure why adobe isn't listing a safe restart/reboot as a fix. But it worked for me 3 times now.
Good luck!

My problem resolved but I'm not sure what actually fixed it. Tried turning Siri on and off and finally installed an Apple security update I'd been ignoring (for 10.13.6) and restarted. Spacebar started working again.

I just fixed my problem. Apple OS shortcut for Siri is the spacebar. Go into preferences and turn off Siri or change the shortcut. Once one you will be able to use the spacebar in Illustrator for the hand tool.

When I press the spacebar the hand tool flickers back and forth super rapidly alternating with whatever the main current tool is. This then makes it a crapshoot if when I click it uses the hand tool or the main tool. More or less making Illustrator completely unusable. Also happening on Photoshop. Only happened after CC 2019 updates. 2018 was fine.

I do web design, this only happened recently, but I can't use illustrator and not have my browser open. I need it and Photoshop and Dreamweaver all running. It's been my work flow for over 8 years. Why now? (I physically can do it, but it'll make my productivity will go WAY down if I have to keep opening and closing the two.)

Govind Gupta, Your comments seemed to be directed to a specific individual. Yet many of us are having this issue. I, for one, am not on a Mac, so do not kn,ow how to respond to your system report comments. I am on an Alienware 17 r5. Thank you.

It has just started doing this too. I have CS6. Hope this can be fixed. you don't realize how valuable something is until its not there.

This was just happening to me as well. I don't recall updating anything at all over the last week and it still just happened. But some of the other commenters are right, I shut down Safari and the spacebar once again produced the hand. Weird.

seriously it's like walking barefoot on Legos... HELP PLEASE

The next time this happens I'd be happy to walk my laptop the three blocks from my office to yours if it'd help. Disabling and re-enabling Siri seems to have fixed it this time.

This seems to be a significant and wide spread issue. Can anyone advise? For me, I am using Alienware 17 r5 and really miss the hand function. It's a critical tool when working fast. Thank you!

Not pleased to see that this issue has been open for a longer thread and there hasn't been any other feedback from the Adobe team than the one above?

I need to do the temporary solution "sleep" step that another person has figured out. See below

Also facing this issue. Working from a new Macbook Pro with latest updates of Adobe CC and all the zoom in functions are disabled across Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Default Zoom has been set to Z and you can't edit keyboard shortcuts to include CMD + Space zoom in option as it doesn't allow any input of CMD.

PS For some of those very angry commenters here, PLEASE will you be a little nicer to the people working at Adobe... they are human beings just like us, and it's not always an easy and quick job troubleshooting and fixing everything at the very moment it happens... each one of us has a system that is a little different from everyone else's and we, in tandem with Adobe, need to figure out what the common cause of the issue is among us.... but Adobe cannot fix it that easily if they are not able to reproduce it on their end so need our help in providing more information :) Just let's all be NICE about it...Please :) HUGS to all of you from a fellow person experiencing the same issue...

I managed to get it working again but I am not exactly sure how because I tried so many different things, including a system restart. One very important thing to note is that when it happens it happens across ALL the Adobe apps... InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator. I have the same applications open now that I did when I was having the issue earlier. I am working on an iMac Pro with 64GB RAM, and using the latest Mac OS Mojave 10.14.2, and also the latest versions of the CC apps.