In this paper, an adaptive fuzzy event-triggered control (ETC) problem of switched nonlinear systems (SNSs) under actuator failures is studied. Fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) are introduced to approximate the unknown nonlinear terms of the system. To reduce the wastage of communication resources (WCRs), an adaptive fuzzy event-triggered mechanism (ETM) with a state-dependent switching law is designed. In order to ensure the stability of whole systems, the convex combination technology is adopted. The dynamic surface control method is employed to deal with the problem of ‘curse of dimensionality’. Additionally, a single Lyapunov function is constructed to analyze the stability of the system. It is proved that all signals of the closed-loop system (CLS) are bounded. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified by simulation results.