How to Fix Notifications Not Working on Windows 11

•
Ankit Kumar
Windows 11TroubleshootingFix

The Problem

No notification banners and no sounds—email, Teams, Outlook, or alarms simply never appear. Nine times out of ten it is Do Not Disturb quietly swallowing them, or a per-app toggle that was switched off and forgotten.

Start menu or taskbar misbehaving too? See Start menu not opening and taskbar not working.

First: One App or All Apps?

The answer sends you down two very different paths.

  • One app only → the app's own settings, its background permission, or its account state. Jump to the last section.
  • Every app → a Windows-wide setting or a broken shell component. Work through the steps in order.

Test it quickly: open Settings → System → Notifications, scroll to any app, and use a reliable trigger such as setting an alarm in the Clock app two minutes ahead.

Step 1: Turn Off Do Not Disturb

  1. Click the date and time on the taskbar to open Notification Center.
  2. If the bell icon shows a crescent moon, Do Not Disturb is on—click it to turn it off.
  3. Also check Settings → System → Notifications and confirm Do not disturb is off there.

Step 2: Check the Master Toggle

Settings → System → Notifications → the top Notifications switch must be On. If this is off, nothing else in this guide matters.

While you are there, tick Show notifications on the lock screen if you expect them there, and confirm Allow notifications to play sounds is on.

Step 3: Fix Automatic Do Not Disturb Rules

Windows enables DND for you under several conditions, and people rarely remember setting them.

  1. Settings → System → Notifications → Turn on do not disturb automatically.
  2. Untick any rule that applies to you:
    • During these times
    • When I'm duplicating my display — this catches everyone who presents or plays on a TV
    • When I'm playing a game
    • When using an app in full-screen mode — including full-screen video and browsers
    • For the first hour after a Windows feature update

The full-screen rule is the single most common cause of "notifications stopped working" reports.

Step 4: End Any Focus Session

A running Focus session silences alerts deliberately. Open the Clock app → Focus sessions → End session if one is active.

Step 5: Review Per-App Settings

  1. Settings → System → Notifications → scroll to Notifications from apps and other senders.
  2. Turn the app on.
  3. Click the app name and check the detail switches: Show notification banners and Play a sound when a notification arrives. An app can be "on" while banners are off, which produces silent alerts that only appear in Notification Center.
  4. Set Priority of notifications in notification center to Top for anything urgent.

Step 6: Let Background Apps Run

An app that Windows has suspended cannot raise a notification.

  1. Settings → Apps → Installed apps.
  2. Find the app → ⋯ → Advanced options.
  3. Set Background apps permissions to Always (or Power optimized).
  4. Also check Settings → System → Power & battery → Battery saver. Battery saver suppresses background activity; raise the auto-on threshold or disable it while testing.

Step 7: Re-register the Shell Components

If notifications are dead across the board, the notification platform may need rebuilding. Right-click Start → Terminal (Admin):

Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

Expect several red errors about packages that cannot be re-registered—those are normal and can be ignored. Restart afterwards.

Step 8: Rebuild the Notification Database

A corrupted notification database silently breaks the whole system. Close all apps, then in Terminal (Admin):

net stop WpnUserService

Then delete the database file at:

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Notifications\wpndatabase.db

Restart the PC. Windows rebuilds the database from scratch. You lose notification history, nothing else.

Step 9: Repair System Files

sfc /scannow

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Details: repair Windows 11 with SFC and DISM.

When Only One App Is Affected

  • Check the app's own notification settings—Teams, Slack, Outlook, and Discord all have internal controls that override nothing but silence plenty.
  • Confirm you are actually signed in to that app's account and it is not in a "away/offline" state.
  • For Outlook, check File → Options → Mail → Message arrival.
  • For a website's push notifications in Chrome or Edge, check the padlock icon → Site settings → Notifications, and see stop spam notifications from your browser if the problem is the opposite one.

Still Nothing?

A damaged user profile breaks notifications system-wide while a fresh account works perfectly. Create a new local account (Settings → Accounts → Other users → Add account) and test there. If notifications work in the new profile, the original profile is the fault—see fix "signed in with a temporary profile".

Related guides