iPhone text messages disappeared

I too have discovered a lot of missing threads. I am devastated as some were very important to me. Am looking at all previous posts to try anything to bring them back! Cannot believe this has been happening for some time and nothing has been done by Apple to sort it out.

I am experiencing the same problem. I have plenty of storage, did all the suggested tricks on turning things off and on, hard restart, etc. i have a back up from yesterday. It appears that not all message history is being deleted just certain contacts.

I will try to restore from the back up. nervous to do that for these messages, but they are important to me. but is a small % of the entire data on my phone. hoping i do not loose things in the back up and the back up works, as i have not had to do that before.

I have exactly the same issue - about 5 of my main contacts have lost all history. Have spent hours on this with Optus and Apple but no one can help. Have tried all fixes mentioned. Now, today my email signatures have all disappeared from Mac Mail... I wonder if this is an iCloud issue - but HOW DO YOU GET ANYONE TO HELP????

This totally sucks. I'm having the same issue, and your situation is not giving me much hope. I use texts pretty much like Slack and I really can't afford to lose reams of text chains for no apparent reason.

After days of trying to recover missing text messages, trying every solution mentioned on numerous websites and using two different phone recovery apps, nothing worked. Then in desperation I did this, and it worked:

I deleted all optional apps that I had downloaded over time, leaving only a few built-in Apple apps that I couldn't delete. I was trying to make my phone as "clean and simple" as possible.

Then I followed these directions: iCloud Backup Restoring

1. Reset your iPhone. Go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.
2. Set up your iPhone. Follow the onscreen setup steps until you reach the Apps & Data screen, then tap Restore from iCloud Backup > Sign in to iCloud with your Apple ID > Choose the backup you want.
3. Wait for the process to complete. Stay connected and wait for a progress bar to appear and complete. Depending on the size of the backup and the network speed, the progress bar might need a few minutes to an hour to complete. If you disconnect from Wi-Fi too soon, the progress will pause until you reconnect.

The italic text above was the key for me, I think. After erasing all content and settings, I saw 2 options for a backup: my current phone, and a previous phone. Fortunately, I had changed phones only recently, so my previous phone contained the texts that I really wanted to recover.

I backed up from my previous phone. After a couple of hours, I saw that there were some changes; for example, some old apps that had been on my previous phone reappeared. But alas, the text messages had not reappeared. I figured they were completely gone now.

But this morning, after the phone was left undisturbed overnight, the old, missing text messages were back!

It seems like a miracle. There was a thread from my son that was crucial to me. It was lost, and now I have it back.

I hope you can find an earlier backup that still contains the messages you really want.

P.S. I now have my phone backed up on my computer, so I think the text messages can be recovered more easily in the future, if need be.

Good luck, and may Apple rot for deleting our texts.

just noticed, any photos or videos or links attached to other messages from other contacts are also all gone.

so i typically don't save them, and can look at them in the info section of the sender, but there is nothing left, and also nothing i sent them.

I was able to finally fix my problem. I'm not sure exactly what it was that finally solved the disappearing text msgs, but these are all the things that I did... 1) I did a reboot of my phone, (iPhone 12 Pro), my friend at ATT said to do a reboot you push the up volume button, the down volume button, then main on/off button and hold that until a full restart or apply symbol comes on. 2) I completely deleted the text thread from the contact messages that were disappearing from and deleted him from my contacts. 3) re-entered the contact, 4) did a second reboot, 5) had my friend initiate a text to my phone. After all that, somehow it solved the problem, I don't know why exactly, because I've tried everything else before. The only thing that was different was learning about the reboot, and the sequence mentioned above. I hope that helps anyone else!

Spend an afternoon at Apple- after hours on phone to Apple and Optus- completely reloaded my phone software and reconnected to ICloud and still same problem - just with certain- key contacts and top conversations- The Genius said he’s never seen this before and could not suggest anything else … all my other iCloud data has reloaded perfectly… I’ve spent far too long on this but really losing confidence in the cloud I must say.

Apple say it is Optus, Optus say it is Apple. Still no resolution and missing many message histories now. The other thing that is now happening is that my phone is signing me out if all my past group conversations- Apple HELP!

Why Is this problem never been fixed by Apple? I now have a Iphone11 and it still deletes old texts. Why??! Even though I set phone to keep messages forever. Why do I need to restore the phone from ITunes? Why do I need to download a third party app to recover them? This is beyond frustrating! APPLE PLEASE FIX THIS!!!

Same here. IPhone SE. messages backed up to iCloud “forever”. Restored from back up did not fix the problem.

i lost 1 group thread and 1 individual thread THAT I KNOW OF. I don’t know what else I am missing because I have no reference for what use to be there, which is in some ways more stressful than losing those threads.

put me down for wanting this addressed by Apple!!!

I’ll try it and come back if it works. TWO HOURS on with “Senior Advisor” Apple Tech today. She was empathetic but has no answers. Says the engineers are working on it.

Tech had me restore my phone from iTunes, but end result was same as the 2x I erased/restored from the phone.

FWIW

1- the lost messages in my case are the former “top conversations.”

what now shows in “top conversations” is old, small, recently deleted messages

2- My iCloud storage was “almost full” (49.5GB of 50GB plan) before the messages disappeared. I was getting notifications that I needed to buy more storage or remove content. Not sure if that is a consistent theme among us having these issues. TODAY, my iCloud shows 28 of 50GB used. So I lost over 20GB of data. But tech gal couldn’t turn that in because I didn’t have a screenshot of the notification or my iCloud storage use to PROVE the data are gone… and it’s not a “known problem” like the disappearing tech messages are. Grrrrrrr 😞☹️🤬

Try turning off messages in iCloud. Click on download messages. It takes time. Just wait. Seems to help. However if you turn it off you won’t share your messages with your other devices. I’ve called Apple and they act like they never heard of this before. Why they can’t fix this or give an explanation I don’t know.