In this paper, the formation control of singular fractional order multi-agent systems with α ∈ (0,1] is investigated. Firstly, under the switching direct communication topologies, the observer based adaptive controllers are designed. Then, by event-triggered scheme and Lyapunov direct method, the formation control algorithm is presented to achieve bounded of the formation error systems. Moreover, according to the event-triggered schemes, the Zeno behaviors are avoided by giving the lower bound. Finally, the validity of the result given is illustrated by a numerical example.