New research shows three-quarters of UK IT teams say they’ve experienced outages as a result of ignored or suppressed alerts in 2025.
The global State of Observability 2025 report from Splunk, which surveyed 1,855 ITOps and engineering professionals, shows alert fatigue is fast becoming one of the most pressing challenges to operational resilience.
In the UK over half (54 percent) of respondents say false alerts are harming morale, and 15 percent admit to deliberately ignoring or suppressing alerts — higher than the global average of 13 percent.
Petra Jenner, SVP and general manager, EMEA at Splunk says:
IT teams are drowning in noise. Every day they’re hit with alerts, but without the right context or ownership, it’s almost impossible to know which ones really matter. This lack of clarity puts a lot of pressure on teams and slows response times.
When critical alerts get lost in that noise, organisations risk downtime and customer disruption, which can quickly translate into revenue loss and lasting reputational damage.
To build resilience and combat alert fatigue, organisations need to consider the psychological wellbeing of their IT staff and ensure the tools they use genuinely support them. This means observability tools that accurately triage alerts, understand context, suggest clear remediation paths, and reduce the number of interfaces already-stressed teams are required to work with. With the right systems in place, alongside better cross-departmental co-ordination, teams can act quickly, with confidence and avoid the pitfalls of alert fatigue.
Teams point to tool sprawl (61 percent), false alerts (54 percent), and the overall volume of alerts (34 percent) as some of the greatest contributors to their stress. These pressure points suggest growing frustration within IT departments, where constant interruptions are taking a toll and creating an environment where critical security alerts could be missed.
A lack of clear ownership is also a problem, just 21 percent of respondents say they regularly isolate incidents to a specific team — a key marker of maturity in incident response — while 36 percent admit they rarely isolate them.
The research shows that when observability and security teams work more closely together, ownership is better-defined and fewer alerts are missed. In fact, 64 percent of global respondents report that stronger collaboration between these functions reduces customer-impacting incidents.
You can read more on the Splunk blog.
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