iPhone text messages disappeared

Does anyone have any additional insight about this problem of entire text threads disappearing for no apparent reason? Just happened to me. All settings are correct - set to “Forever”, set to “On” for backing up to iCloud. Ample space on my iPhone and ample space in my iCloud account. All of my text message history from my son has disappeared. There are many things in our “forever” thread that I want to keep and have access to. I have done everything suggested in this thread from a year ago, but no luck retrieving them. There has not been a recent update. How could this happen without me changing any of my settings? More importantly, how can it get fixed?

I have this same issue. Noticed it yesterday May 30, 2022. Only one of my contacts text message thread were all gone from the past few days, however the most recent messages from the last day were there. All of my own messages to him were all there but his were all gone. I did everything that was suggested here is community posts and still nothing. Mine is iPhone X and updated a couple days back. Those messages were all there but as of yesterday gone for just the one contact. Very strange indeed. Regarding trying to get support direct from apple would be comparable to trying to get support from an old worn out bra. Just saying... good luck in your search for an answer.

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.

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!!!

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.

Same thing has happened to me. Nothing has worked and spoken to multiple support team people who said nothing can be done. I restored from backup where they were and messages have been "indexing" for over 24 hours now. Apple has been no help and I'm thinking of using a third party recovery app. Were you able to retreive?

I went to settings,messages

start new conversation from

only have your phone number

ticked untick any email addresses

then restarted phone and like magic

messages returned

no thanks to apple none of their suggestions worked

A lot of weird iPhone glitches are happening

thanks YouTube for the fix

please let me know if it worked

👍

Yes! This works!!! Thank you thank you thank you for sharing this. Such an easy fix. iMessage wasn’t turned on in my iCloud settings. As soon as I turned it on, my messages started downloading from iCloud and everything is back. Yay!