Palo Alto Networks Firewall Blocking Harness Connections

We are currently investigating connectivity issues affecting customers whose environments are protected by Palo Alto Networks firewalls. These firewalls are blocking connections to Harness APIs, which may result in:

• Failed pipeline executions
• Inability to deploy applications
• Intermittent timeouts when accessing Harness platform features
• Integration failures with third-party tools
• Delegate connectivity with Harness platform

This issue is not caused by a Harness service outage, but rather by firewall rules on your network side. We are advising customers to make an exception for our DNS endpoints.

Mitigation Available: Harness Traffic Blocked by Network Security Policy

We have identified an issue where some customers may be unable to access Harness because Harness traffic is being categorized as “AI-Platform” by Palo Alto network security controls and subsequently blocked by the customer's firewall/INET policy.

If you are experiencing this issue:

Please contact your organization's Network/Firewall/CyberSecurity team and request that the required Harness traffic be allowed through your Palo Alto firewall policy.

As a mitigation, customers can allow the “AI-Platform” URL category for the required Harness endpoints, or add the affected Harness domains/FQDNs to their organization's approved/allow list, in accordance with their security policies.

After the firewall policy is updated, access to Harness should be restored.

Important: The firewall policy is managed by the customer's network/security team. If the Harness endpoint is incorrectly categorized by Palo Alto, customers can also request a URL-category review from Palo Alto Networks.

After consultation with Palo Alto Networks, we can confirm that on Sept 23rd 2026, app.harness.io was categorized as an AI Platform Service by the Palo Alto Networks Team.  Palo Alto Networks sent a notice to customers in August about the reclassification.

This change may place AI Platform Service under a different policy than app.harness.io's previous ruleset categorization, Computer and Internet Info.  The policy applied is dependent on customer settings. Harness Customers should discuss this categorization and the alerts with their internal network team and Palo Alto Networks.

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