With the stringent resources and distributed nature in wireless sensor networks, fault diagnosis of sensor nodes faces great challenges. In order to solve the problem that the existing approaches of diagnosing sensor networks have high false alarm ratio and considerable computation redundancy on nodes, a new fault detection mechanism based on Cumulative Sum Chart (CUSUM) and neighbor-coordination was proposed. Firstly, the historical data on a single node were analyzed by CUSUM to improve the sensitivity of fault diagnosis and locate the change point. Then, the fault nodes were detected though judging the status of nodes by the data exchange between neighbor nodes. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy is over 97.7% and the false alarm ratio is below 2% when the sensor fault probability in wireless sensor networks is up to 35%. Hence, the proposed algorithm has a high detection accuracy and low false alarm ratio even in the conditions of high fault probabilities and reduces the influence of sensor fault probability clearly.