UK IT teams struggle with alert fatigue, leading to outages

Per Tech Radar, a significant portion of UK IT teams are experiencing outages due to missed critical alerts, a problem exacerbated by alert fatigue and tool sprawl.

A report by Splunk indicates that three in four UK IT teams faced outages in 2025 because critical alerts were missed. Over half of respondents (54%) believe that false alerts negatively impact morale, leading 15% of British IT teams to ignore alerts, compared to 13% globally. Tool sprawl is identified as the primary stressor for 61% of teams, contributing more to missed alerts than false alerts (54%) or the sheer volume of notifications (34%). This suggests that a more streamlined and properly configured environment could prevent many of these failures.

The consequences of missed and false alerts include increased downtime, potential breaches, customer disruption, revenue loss, reputational damage, and IT staff burnout. Splunk recommends implementing stronger observability tools with added context and remediation paths, alongside simplifying the tool landscape. Furthermore, improving cross-team coordination and focusing on the psychological well-being of IT staff are crucial for building resilience and combating alert fatigue, with two-thirds of global respondents agreeing that better collaboration between observability and security teams reduces customer-impacting incidents.

Source: Tech Radar