On December 5, 2025, beginning at 08:47 UTC, an outage within Cloudflare's infrastructure resulted in widespread internet disruption. The failure led to large-scale connectivity interruption for numerous cloud platforms. As a result, the Anaplan platform was unavailable for 25 minutes. This incident was triggered by a configuration change deployed by Cloudflare that contained a latent software bug. The issue originated entirely outside of the Anaplan environment. However, as Cloudflare is a critical component of the internet ecosystem, this failure had a direct downstream impact on our customers' ability to access the Anaplan platform. The Anaplan platform was unavailable from 08:47 UTC to 09:12 UTC. All Anaplan regions were impacted by this external event.
Root Cause
Cloudflare, a major provider of internet routing and security services, initiated a global configuration update intended to enhance their Web Application Firewall (WAF). This update was deployed in two parts. The second part of the change, which was rapidly propagated across their network, exposed a previously undetected bug in their software.
This bug caused an error state in a portion of Cloudflare's proxy servers. This led their systems to return HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) responses instead of forwarding user traffic. This failure directly interrupted the ability of our customers to access the platform. At 09:11 UTC, Cloudflare identified and reverted the faulty configuration change. Full service to the Anaplan platform was restored at 09:12 UTC, once the fix was fully propagated.
Our Response and Recovery
Our monitoring systems detected login and routing anomalies, triggering an immediate incident response from our technical teams. Within minutes of initiating our investigation, we isolated the issue to the Cloudflare outage.
Throughout the event, we monitored all Anaplan services to ensure our platform components remained healthy and to validate that the impact stemmed solely from the upstream provider. As Cloudflare rolled out their fix, we evaluated recovery to confirm that service stability was returning for all customers.
Corrective and Preventative Actions
Although this was an external global internet outage, we hold ourselves accountable for the experience our customers have with the Anaplan platform. We are taking several steps to strengthen our resilience:
We apologize for the disruption this global outage has caused to your business operations. We understand that downtime — no matter the source — has a real impact.
If you have further questions or concerns, please visit our Support website. We appreciate your patience during this incident and value the trust you place in Anaplan