In the field of alternative electrical power generation, the durability of the energy presents a great challenge to science. Fuel Cells (FCs) are considered as one of the future promising energy sources. The Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) is more suitable for implementation into daily-use applications. To bring FCs into the market, such technology should have an adequate operation reliability, sufficient lifetime and acceptable cost. Therefore, different problems associated with the faults of FC various components influence the reliability of the system. The issues can be successfully overcome using the diagnostic tools as part of the advanced control system. In this paper, after a short presentation of the FC and its components, the paper emphasizes different faults that may occur. Using the literature, the root causes of these faults are identified. From this point, a state of the art on the recent studies concerning the fault diagnosis method is presented. In order to illustrate the state of the art, a brief experimental study of the impact of anode flooding is given and a signal based diagnostic method is suggested. (C) 2016 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.