Contacts missing after iOS 18.6 update

Again... what were you syncing your contacts with?

Contacts can be synced to iCloud, an Exchange account, or virtually any email account.

The most likely cause for contacts going missing is a problem syncing with the account they were being synced with.

This is has also happened to me I originally had nearly 800 contacts stored on my phone and backup to iCloud but over the past few weeks I have started to notice some of them are not working/shown correctly and when I have recently checked the total amount in iCloud it’s showing under 500 and I definitely have not removed over 300 contacts!!

this has only happened since the recent iOS update!!

I use my iPhone for personal and business and this has caused me a huge headache!!

Same thing. Not all contacts gone but a lot of them are. I have not yet attempted to recover them from iCloud, but I’m about to do so. If I scroll through previous texts, many of them now just have phone numbers and not names.

i am really sorry Sir, I got a brand new bot jailbroken iPhone 16 pro with a memory of 256gb what’s below the half of storage space in Using, it all worked fine , no settings where changed , no other mistake from the options you mentioned here are applicable .

And I remember a long time ago where I called Apple support and i needed an older backup to restore on my phone as something went there wrong and they could restore a backup what was a few months old and I couldn’t see it as you see always only the last recent one . And now I was told as I hoped this would get the contacts back, your support said, no backup can be older as 30 days I’ve never heard that before. And how can u explain that this message : this device gets managed by someone else, how do you explain that Apple the first time has no answer to this. I mean are we really talking to apple still, as Apple said the last time it can’t remotely connect to my new phone. Since when apple can’t do anything !?

This happened today to my wife's iphone 16 pro after it updated to 18.6.3. So this seems to be a thing that can happen after any update from at least 18.6 on.

It's unfortunate that Apple has not acknowledged or corrected this after so many months of it being an issue.

For any Apple employee that cares to have an IT person run down the symptoms of this so you can actually fix it, this is for you.

In here case:

1. she has icloud as her default location for contacts. She has had it that way for years. The small number of contacts coming from other connected accounts are FINE. It's only the icloud contacts affected.
2. She backs up all possible categories to icloud.
3. Like everyone experiencing this, She doesn't have most of her contacts listed in the contacts app either on the phone or on icloud.com.
4. Even though her phone backed up to icloud at 2:20 am this morning prior to any update by a half day, the only "archives" listed in icloud.com data recovery are from AFTER the update.
5. She has the same symptom as most that if she types a name when composing a text, all of that person's relevant info shows up until the text is sent.

IT guy speculation: Symptom 5 seems to indicate that either a) the contacts aren't really gone, they just aren't displaying correctly, or b) the contact informtion maybe cached somewhere and Apple may be able to use that to recover the contacts if the update deleted them.

For those that have missing contacts after an update, to know quickly if it's the Apple update contact bug, or if it's a problem with another account, you can simply do this: go to the contacts settings and see what your default is. If it's icloud, and you have contacts set to sync in icloud, then this isn't your fault. If you had it set to exchange or gmail or some other location, and that location is not syncing, then it may be you had unsynced contacts that are now gone.

Now a queation: has anyone who lost contacts, can see them in the text composeing area, and had icloud as their default contact location tried a full reset and restore? Do the icloud contacts correct after a reset and restore?

Well said as a unix consultant and I run my own business you are correct and this is an issue with apple or a bug !!! Not a problem with us users !!!

have said the same to the support person below !!

I was able to get my Contacts back by syncing with my work’s Outlook (which thankfully had all those numbers saved through years of syncing. Nothing else I tried work…it absolutely appears to be a direct result of the update…literally occurred 2 minutes after I ran the update.

Yes, the people who are most affected are those that trusted icloud to store their contacts.

If you sync with a 3rd party service, you are far more likely to have another copy there that can you can induce to sync back to the phone.

Same here (iPhone 16 pro), I’ve noticed problem after 18.6.2 update. Sync to iCloud is set for Contacts app but there is nothing on iCloud so restore is not possible. As others mentioned, when typing contact name in messages contact info is visible so there is hope that this can be resolved with a patch. Hopefully soon.

Yes I’ve spent hours on the phone with Apple writing in here was my last resort to see if anybody had the same issue. Apple basically told me to start resaving my contacts and that they were aware of the issue.

I spent 3+ hours with apple over the phone and nothing has been able to bring my contacts back.

Mine updated to 18.6.1 a couple of days ago and it happened to me.

PS - this is a brand new 16 pro max and the data transfer went perfectly and was all good for a week or so….

has to be an issue with apple no matter what they say!!!