The concept of faults and fault handling are added to the execution of continuous event processing (CEP) queries. By introducing fault handling techniques to the processing of CEP queries, users are enabled to instruct a CEP query processor to respond to faults in a customized manner that does not necessarily involve the halting of the CEP query relative to which the faults occurred. For example, a fault might be due to a temporary problem. Under such circumstances, the CEP query processor can be instructed to ignore the fault and allow the execution of the CEP query to continue relative to the remainder of the event stream. Alternatively, if the fault is due to a problem with the CEP query itself, then the CEP query processor can be instructed to propagate the fault through the query processing system until the fault ultimately causes the problematic CEP query to be halted.