This article considers the design problem of observer‐based fault‐tolerant control under three faulty cases: sensor only, actuator only, and both sensor and actuator faults. To save communication resources, the event trigger mechanism method is used for sensor‐to‐observer and observer‐to‐controller transmissions. In this case, the design method of the new observer is given for obtaining estimating both states and faults which are used to design observer‐based fault‐tolerant controllers. In particular, the virtual observer is designed to suppress the effects of faults on the system. As the virtual observer contains unmeasurable system information, the real observer is built on top of the virtual observer to eliminate the unmeasurable information. Finally, the feasibility of the approach is tested with a numerical example.