Excessive alarms aren't just a problem at sea.

There have also been fatal aviation accidents where there's a problem with a common system (a dip in the power supply or hydraulic pressure, or a problem with a critical sensor) and dozens of systems sound alarms at the same time [1].

And for a technology example, a database server disappearing might raise a single alarm, but the applications that rely on that database might raise countless alarms as attempts to connect fail over and over again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight...

Good alert deduplication and dependency rules are worth so much. "Dear alerting, don't start throwing a fit about those 600 systems over there if you can't even reach the firewall all traffic to those systems goes through". Suddenly you don't get throttled by your SMS provider for the volume of alerts it tries to send, and instead just get one very spicy message.

Snark aside, this also impacts resolution time, because done well, this instantly points out the most critical problem, instead of all the consequences of one big breaking. "Dear operator, don't worry about the hundreds of apps, the database cluster is down".

This is a big topic in aviation. But the example you link to is about ACARS messages which are sent to the ground via data link, not visible to the crew.

The ECAM system is what displays issues to the crew. There is a lot of logic there on what to show and what to inhibit. For example some errors aren't shown during takeoff since it's more important to focus on safely starting the climb, they would only be shown once past 400ft altitude.

There is also a priority order based on criticality, they don't just show up in chronological order. Engine fire for example is a red warning and would always come above a yellow caution message. It's designed in a way where the results of the major problem (e.g. engine on fire, and then loosing electric power from that side) are lower priority than the problem itself.

I think that you are confusing ACARS messages (those transmitted from the aircraft via airband radio or satellite) with ECAM messages (those that are displayed to the pilots). The former are mainly for operational reasons, for example so that ground engineers get forewarning of a failing component. ECAM messages are flight safety critical messages requiring pilot action and they are organised by priority.

ECAM messages are recorded by the DFDR/CVR but are not normally transmitted via ACARS. Pilots were not normally aware of ACARS messages (see MH370).

Your point is a fair one though. In the case of AF447 the crew, against their training, made no attempt at all to work their way through the multiple ECAM messages with the appropriate checklist so they died. The final report on QF32 shows what a high workload this can be.

Since AF447 was lost for nearly two years the ACARS messages were all that the investigators had to go on until they found the wreckage and the DFDR and CVR. Incidentally, one problem with those ACARS messages was that they are only timestamped to the minute and may arrive out of order which makes the interpretation of them more difficult.

This is the flight where one pilot tried to pull up to recover from the stall, and the warning for dual input (which Airbus just averages together) was snoozed by the system yelling about the other errors and was reduced to a light they didn't notice. The captain commented towards the end"no don't climb". The stall alarm was the one the system chose to display over all others and was mishandled (by the pilot who didn't know how to recover from a stall).

Boeing there's physical feed back, when one control moves so does the other.

This was not the first time pilots were having conflicting input without noticing.

>https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf

It's hitting cars too. Our 2026 Chevy equinox has so many alarms and chimes that we have zero control over, the worst one has no notification of what its alerting us of.

As a pretty decent driver, this terrifies me, because I first think, "What am I missing?" But then it hits me - these alarms and chimes are breeding generations of drivers, not just young ones, who are grossly incompetent and should not be driving.

The fact that I cannot control what alarms go off is asinine. And they put a lock on how low you can turn the chime volume. So, basically, you're telling me that I have to harass my neighbors at 5 am when I load the car for work, because you want to chime nonstop when the door is open and I have zero control to turn it off or lower than the locked minimum. Oh, and don't forget the threats of voiding the warrantee if you dig deeper to disable anything. My favorite alarm and warning pops up randomly when you're driving, sometimes blocking the map, and it says something to the effect of, "Remember to stay focused on driving!"

I see this slipping into not just alerts and notifications, but also ads. Waze does not care if they block my directions by blasting an ad on part of my screen, which has absolutely caused me to miss exits since they don't want to tell you the exit ahead of time on longer strips, only, "drive for 45 miles"...

I see this like popups, and if industry can't handle themselves they need to be forced to stop doing this altogether and find a rework, since it's clearly affecting private and public machines that could burnout or kill people.