The 3am ping, how do you actually switch off?
Hi everyone,
44%. That's how many organisations had an outage last year that traced back to an alert somebody had suppressed or ignored. It comes from a 2026 study of just over a thousand SRE, DevOps and IT ops professionals, which also found 78% had at least one incident where no alert fired at all.*
It’s a tricky balance: too much noise and people stop hearing it. Not enough and nobody finds out until a customer tells them. I'm not sure which of those is worse to be on the receiving end of!
Sophos put the question to 5,000 IT and cybersecurity professionals across 17 countries. 76% had experienced fatigue or burnout in the previous year, constantly, frequently or occasionally. 69% said it had got worse than the year before. Nearly half reported more anxiety about breaches, and about a third said their engagement at work had dropped.**
Catchpoint's SRE Report came at it from a different angle but nonetheless ended somewhere similar, with about 70% saying on-call stress had resulted to burnout and and people leaving on their team. Time spent on operational work had crept up from a median of 25% to 30%, the first rise they'd recorded in years.***
Should be said too that none of this is a personal failing. Ultimately, it's a design problem, and the person who designed the thing is rarely the one whose phone goes off at 3am (developer privilege perhaps?)
I’ve been on call a few times in my previous gaming industry life - live ops products have to be staffed 24/7 but I don’t really have any advice other than making coffee quickly and efficiently! What I do notice is that most of the advice out there is written for whoever runs the rota rather than whoever is on it. The genuinely useful stuff, the things that help on a wet Tuesday night, tends to come from people doing the job.
🔗*New study finds alert fatigue has become a production reliability risk — Business Wire
🔗**Report: Addressing cybersecurity burnout in 2025 — Sophos
🔗***The SRE Report 2025 — Catchpoint
Over to you:
- Are you on a rotation, and what does it honestly look like? Team size, frequency, and whether the theory matches the reality.
- What is the single change that made the biggest difference? Better alert tuning, a bigger rota, protected recovery time, a manager who actually enforced it?
- Do you keep work and personal properly separated on your device, or is it one phone doing everything and you have made peace with that?
- And on a lighter note, what is the most ridiculous thing you have ever been woken up for?
Cheers,
Kirk
