Epic has confirmed that the Epic Games Launcher is behind the stray notification sounds some Windows users keep hearing. The official Fortnite Status account says the launcher's "party chimes are triggering more often than we intended".
In that reply, posted on Saturday, September 19, 2026, Epic said it is "updating the Epic Games Launcher to narrow which events play a sound while the launcher is in the background". The stated goal is that people "hear fewer of them" when they are not actively using it.
What Epic actually committed to
Epic's wording is narrow. The company says it will cut down which background events trigger a sound, not that it will remove the chimes.
No version number, build number or release date came with the reply. That single social post is the only official statement on the issue.
The launcher is the same app that handles the weekly Epic Games Store giveaways and Unreal Engine downloads. Many people leave it running for hours without opening it.
The six party sounds involved
The trigger list comes from Fortnite community dataminer FireMonkey, who traced the noise to the launcher's audio files. Epic's reply does not restate or verify that list.
- Party User Left
- Push to Talk Activated
- Push to Talk Deactivated
- Party Joinability Changed
- Party Message Received
- Party User Joined
All six tie back to the launcher's social and party features. Those events can fire while the window sits in the background, which is why the sound seems to come from nowhere.
FireMonkey said the noise had been an annoyance "for like a week" before that post. The timeline is a personal account, not an Epic-confirmed one.
No mute switch has been promised
A settings toggle for the chimes has been reported as part of Epic's plans. Epic's own reply contains no such promise.
The request came from a player instead. One reply asked Epic for "the option to have them make sounds at all," and argued that new settings should ship switched off by default.
No Epic-run account has agreed to that. A full disable option should be treated as unconfirmed until Epic says otherwise.
Windows-side workarounds while the fix is pending
Microsoft documents two ways to mute any app's notification sound. Neither is Epic-specific, and neither is an official fix for this bug.
For one app, Microsoft says to "Select Start > Settings > System > Notifications", then select the app under "Notifications from apps and other senders". The listed options include "Play a sound: toggle the sound for incoming notifications".
For everything at once, Microsoft says to "open the notification center and select the bell icon with zZ on it". That bell "will silence all notifications until you manually turn it off".
Epic does publish a support article on managing launcher notifications, covering "party and chat notifications". Its text never mentions sound or chimes, so it cannot be called a confirmed fix for the audio.
What is still unconfirmed
No fix has shipped at the time of writing. Epic's public status page carries no incident for this, and the Epic Games Store changelog has no entry mentioning the sounds.
There is no ETA, and Epic has not said when the over-triggering began. The chimes arrived without patch notes, which is a small but real gap for a client in the middle of a broad storefront rebuild.
Details were checked on September 22, 2026, and Epic could update the launcher at any point after that.
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