I’ve had hundreds of phone number Contacts changed from labeled names back to just digits. this even includes contacts that are in my favorite list. Ive followed all the troubleshooting I can find online in terms of syncing contacts in iCloud, turning the phone off and nothing has worked. any ideas?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: IPhone 16 contacts disappear
iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18
No, it was confirmed that the contacts that were not showing up were from an old corporate email on exchange that I had not even been connected to since 2018.
No, it was confirmed that the contacts that were not showing up were from an old corporate email on exchange that I had not even been connected to since 2018.
If you go to Contacts and look in the upper left corner of the screen, you should see "List". Tap on that and see how many groups you have listed there. It is possible that you have more than one place you are syncing contacts. See what you find there. What had you done just prior to this happening? Did you log out of mail account, or delete one?
Thank you so much. I do have three different email accounts, but all should have been backing up to iCloud. In any case, I ended up spending a couple hours on the phone with an apple support representative and they ended up having me do an entire reset of my phone. An old corporate email account that I’m no longer actively using or connected to, but held over 400 contacts all those contacts had been removed. Apple informed me that in the past two weeks they’ve had hundreds of people calling in with the same issue with old, inactive exchange Accounts. And all of a sudden, any contacts associated with that account no longer showing up .The exact issue has not officially been identified, but she believes it had to do with a recent update. Once we did the phone reset the 400 contacts on the third exchange email account reappeared. We saved them to files and then from files saved them to Apple contacts and then they were all recaptured and saved under iCloud. Phew!
Sorry, I cannot provide exact steps on how we did this, but if anyone else is having this same issue with missing contacts, it could be from an old exchange account and I suggest calling Apple to walk them through the steps.
Thank you. OK, I did that and many of the phone numbers that reverted back to just digits were not listed in contacts. one of these is my son who has been in my contacts since he owned a phone eight years ago. Some of the contacts have emails and some don’t in case that’s relevant. The other troubleshooting I did was to go into settings and iCloud and turn off contact sync and turn it back on. I turned my phone on and off a few different times. And then I just tried a restore contacts in the iCloud browser from a archived two weeks ago when I know I had all the contacts labeled, but that did not do anything either.
By any chance, were the missing contacts saved from whatsapp or directly to your phone book/contacts?
Log into iCloud on a browser and see if the contacts are complete there. If so, you can turn them off on the phone and then turn them back on again and wait for them to sync. Not knowing exactly what troubleshooting you have already done it is hard to say something else. You can also try a Force Restart. It is different than turning the phone off and back on again. Here are the instructions for a Force Restart. Force restart iPhone - Apple Support
Hundreds of iPhone 16 contacts revert to digits despite iCloud sync and troubleshooting
