Text messages are missing after iOS 18.3.1 update

I am currently experiencing the same despite paying 2 TB of storage each month. Years worth of messages with my partner all gone. Our thread only goes up to the 20th of January. I am so livid

JenD45 wrote:

I am livid. I have a habit of saving my text streams. I have had my text stream with my husband saved for years. There was over 30,000 messages from him. (probably more) but I still had plenty of room left in my 256 GB phone an iPhone 13 Pro. Max. My phone did the latest software update last night iOS 18.3.1 and I noticed my husband‘s text stream was missing. I thought maybe I deleted it on accident (though that would be very difficult). I went into the recently deleted texts and there were only 500 messages in there from him for 29 days??? it appears my phone deleted all the messages from him from January 1, 2025 until the present. Those were the 500 I was able to retrieve from “recently deleted”. The other 30,000 messages were gone and not even in the deleted items folder! How does something like this even happen?? And why was it only his text stream? This is not the first time this has happened to me.

Last year, Apple decided to randomly delete all of my videos I had saved in my phone. all of the videos I had of my mom and my dog who both passed away. I was devastated. My iCloud has been full for years and I do not pay for extra storage. Because of this Apple rarely does anything to help.

What is going on? Is there any way to recover all these text messages? Not sure what the point of buying a phone with a lot of space is if Apple is just going to decide to delete everything once in a while on its own for no reason.

You ran out of icloud is full but you don't want to buy more icloiud storage? You would've gotten a notice that your icloud is full and to buy more storage how it that Apple not helping?

And since you don't have icloud storage that would mean you don't have a backup, which is how you would restore data back to your phone.