Potholes remain one of the leading causes of road accidents and damage to vehicles, mainly due to poorly maintained roads or slow maintenance in some regions. Their detection by traditional approaches is usually manual and tends to be time-consuming; thus, it mostly fails to provide timely enough information to enable preventive action. This study proposes an IoT-enabled pothole detection and alert system for the rapid and real-time monitoring of road surface conditions. The system is composed of an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor for detecting changes in depth, an MPU 6050 accelerometer–gyroscope module to capture the vibration patterns, and an ESP32 microcontroller with onboard processing and wireless data transmission. Whenever any pothole is detected, it will trigger immediate visual and audio alerts on the web dashboard along with sending automated email notifications to the concerned authorities. It logs all event data into the cloud database for further analysis. The experimental validation demonstrated across several test conditions indicated steady pothole detection with an accuracy estimation of more than 90% and a false alarm rate of practically zero on normal road surfaces. In this work, road safety is enhanced and vehicle damage reduced, thus enabling timely maintenance of roads due to its continuous automated monitoring.