The %-sign has a special meaning in crontab.
man 5 crontab:
“…Percent-signs (%) in the command, unless escaped with backslash (\), will be changed into newline characters, and all data after the first % will be sent
to the command as standard input. ”
So don’t forget to escape the %-signs with a backslash if you use them for example to format the date output:
`date +'\%Y\%m\%d'`