Abstract In proton exchange membrane fuel cells, cost, reliability and durability are important issues that need to be solved before their commercialization. Their performance decrease during operation is attributed, amongst others, to the loss of electrochemical surface area occurring during long-term ageing, after transients or after an incident (faulty operation). These losses are mainly due to catalyst metal degradation and carbon-support corrosion, which are continuous irreversible processes that can dramatically reduce the fuel cell lifetime. In this paper, the phenomena linked to catalyst and carbon-support degradation are reviewed, focusing on those caused by fuel and oxidant starvation, since these faulty conditions are amongst the most critical for fuel cell durability. A description of reactions potentially involved in the catalyst degradation, associated with thermodynamic and kinetic considerations related to fuel cell operation are reviewed. This information is used to interpret the experimental results presented in the literature and reviewed in this paper. Based on these reviews, an analysis of the “reverse decay current mechanism” is performed and an alternative mechanism is suggested together with an experiment that would identify the most likely between them. Finally, some characterization methods or mitigation strategies are listed and an illustrative fault tree is built, pointing out the relationship between causes and symptoms in catalyst degradation.