Overview: Alert Fatigue

Quick Definition

Alert fatigue is the distracted, burned-out state that cybersecurity and especially security operations center (SOC) team members experience when an organization's cybersecurity tools generate so many warnings and alerts that they can't all be investigated.

Alert fatigue is a significant problem because it increases employee turnover, decreases employee effectiveness, and tends to generate a "cry wolf" condition in which actually critical cybersecurity alerts are missed or ignored because of a very high alert load and increasing habits of ignoring alerts.