Contact phone numbers lost formatting after overseas trip

I recently traveled to the Philippines. While I was there I used a couple of different services for cellular data on my iPad Pro. I believe this year is the ECM in my iPad Pro if I’m not mistaken. Now that I have return to the United States I find that all of my contacts have their phone numbers unformatted. In other words it’s not formatted for the US with parentheses around the area code etc. It’s just a string of numbers now. One affect of this that caused me to notice what was going on was I got a message and messages or iMessage andIt wasn’t labeling the numbers with the name it was just showing the numbers. When I looked in Contacts the numbers were there for that contact but they were unformatted. I see a few things online and in the Apple support forums where people of had similar problems and turned off and turned on their settings for location and language. Or switch them to another country. I tried this and it has not helped. I also tried resetting the iPad Pro which some people said help them.However this did not work either. So now I don’t know how to fix it. Everything is fine on my MacBook Pro and on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. It does appear this is a result of traveling overseas and using the ESim in a different region. Not sure what the fix is?

iPad Pro 12.9-inch, 3rd Gen, Wi-Fi, Cell

Posted on Oct 30, 2019 6:06 PM

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Posted on Oct 31, 2019 2:02 AM

OK, I knew this couldn’t be irreversible or it would be the worst bug ever. There was a simple and obvious solution! I just needed to go into settings/cellular/cellular plans and switch from the overseas data plan I purchased to the cellular data plan I have with T-mobile here in the USA. Once I did this, Voila!, all my phone numbers are correctly formatted again.


Basically, it appears that the iPad formats your phone numbers based on the location of the data plan you have selected. I had heard some other people solve this by inserting a physical SIM from a provider here in the US but since I was using Esim this worked.


I hope this helps someone else who missed the obvious like I did!

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 31, 2019 2:02 AM in response to QuickPost

OK, I knew this couldn’t be irreversible or it would be the worst bug ever. There was a simple and obvious solution! I just needed to go into settings/cellular/cellular plans and switch from the overseas data plan I purchased to the cellular data plan I have with T-mobile here in the USA. Once I did this, Voila!, all my phone numbers are correctly formatted again.


Basically, it appears that the iPad formats your phone numbers based on the location of the data plan you have selected. I had heard some other people solve this by inserting a physical SIM from a provider here in the US but since I was using Esim this worked.


I hope this helps someone else who missed the obvious like I did!

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Contact phone numbers lost formatting after overseas trip

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