Alert Fatigue Hits IT Teams: Outages on the Rise

As managing technology infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, IT teams are facing a problem known as 'alert fatigue'. A new report published by Splunk reveals that three-quarters (75%) of IT teams, particularly in the UK, experienced outages in 2025 due to missed critical alerts. This situation stems not only from a technical configuration issue but also from a psychological burnout caused by teams being constantly bombarded with alarm sounds and notifications.

False Alarms and Tool Sprawl Are Core Problems

More than half (54%) of the report's participants stated that false positives damage team morale. British teams were found to ignore alerts more frequently (15%) compared to the global average (13%). However, the most striking problem is 'tool sprawl'. 61% of participants said that the large number of different monitoring and management tools used is a greater source of stress than false alarms (54%) or the sheer volume of alerts (34%), and leads to missing critical warnings.

Consequences: Outage, Vulnerability, and Burnout

The consequences of missed or misleading alarms are quite severe. These include increased risk of downtime or data breach, disruption in customer service, revenue loss, reputational damage, and burnout among IT staff. Petra Jenner, Splunk's Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA, stated, "The lack of clarity creates significant pressure on teams and slows down response times."

These kinds of operational challenges become even more pronounced with the pressure that resource-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence add to the infrastructure. While the integration of AI into business processes increases complexity, ensuring the resilience of the infrastructure is critical.

Proposed Solution: Context and Collaboration

Splunk suggests deploying more robust 'observability' tools as a solution to the problem. These tools should facilitate understanding the root cause of issues and suggesting remediation paths by adding more context to events. The company also calls for a massive simplification by reducing the number of tools and interfaces used by IT teams.

The report emphasizes that the psychological well-being of IT teams who monitor and fix outages should not be overlooked. Improving coordination between teams and a sense of responsibility is essential. Indeed, two-thirds (64%) of global participants agree that better collaboration between observability and security teams reduces customer-impacting incidents.

Jenner concluded, "With the right systems and better cross-departmental coordination, teams can act quickly and confidently and avoid the pitfalls of alert fatigue." A similar systems-oriented approach parallels the 'world models' philosophy that research groups like AMI Labs are working on to improve AI's ability to understand the world.