First defined in Outpaced by AI by Waydell D. Carvalho.
Outcome: The information needed to stop the failure was present, and unread.
A monitoring system that produces an alert about a real problem is not the same as an organization that acts on it. The first runs at the speed of the system. The second runs at the speed of human attention. Alert Fatigue is what happens when the volume of signals outruns the attention available to process them.
The 2013 Target breach is the example. The company had bought a high-end intrusion-detection system and staffed two security operations centers to watch it. When attackers began moving stolen card data out of the network, the system fired. It flagged the malware. It even captured the attackers' own server credentials. The alerts were correct, they were escalated, and they were logged. No one acted on them, and around 40 million card numbers left the building.
The reason was not incompetence. A security operations center processes alerts in the thousands per shift, and almost all of them are false positives, routine scans, or duplicates. The analyst's job is to spot the shape of an alert that matters against the constant stream of alerts that do not. The breach alerts had the right shape. They also looked, in form, exactly like the noise the team had learned to live inside.
That is the mechanism. When everything generates an alert, the alerts stop carrying information. The signal that should trigger an emergency arrives in the same channel, in the same format, with the same urgency markers as the thousand signals that should trigger nothing. The system did its job. The capacity to see the one alert that mattered was the thing that had been exhausted.
AI monitoring makes this worse, not better, because automated systems are tireless alert generators. More sensors, more thresholds, and more dashboards produce more signal, and more signal is not more insight past the point where a human can absorb it. An organization that responds to risk by adding alerts is often reducing the chance that the important one gets seen. The question is not how much you are monitoring. It is how much of it a person can actually act on.