Alert fatigue is a state of desensitization experienced by security analysts and IT personnel when they are overwhelmed by an excessive volume of security notifications from monitoring systems such as SIEMs, IDS, and EDR platforms. This phenomenon occurs when professionals are constantly bombarded with alerts—many of which are low-priority, redundant, or false positives—causing their ability to identify and prioritize genuine threats to become severely compromised.

The consequences of alert fatigue represent a critical operational risk for organizations. It leads to reduced vigilance, slower incident response times, and an increased likelihood that legitimate, high-impact security incidents will be overlooked or dismissed entirely. This human-centric vulnerability directly undermines an organization's security posture, rendering even sophisticated threat detection capabilities less effective. Addressing alert fatigue through alert tuning, automation, and improved prioritization mechanisms is fundamental to maintaining robust threat intelligence operations and ensuring effective risk mitigation strategies.