Safari private tabs deleted after iOS 15 update

Unfortunately, the same thing happened to me. Apparently, the current iOS update was installed yesterday night, because everything was fine before.

I’m also devastated and have been saving open tabs in there for 5+ years. I’ve even reached the max amount of tabs sometimes. I once in a while visited these tabs to get some inspiration and just save things for later. And now it’s all gone! I’m highly devastated and cannot understand how this could have happened especially in a huge company like Apple, who have done hundreds of updates in the past years.

Sadly, I don’t know a way to fix this and don’t think the tabs can be recreated when gone.

I can’t believe this just happened to me!!! I swear iphone is getting worse and worse like what the **** is the point of updating your phone if you have to be scared constantly of it doing stupid **** like this!!! I’ve had important tabs opened since at least 3 years ago and over the corse of 3 phones! This is absolutely ridiculous, you would think keeping you tabs private out of security would be the smart thing to do but of course they would go and do some **** like this!

Hello,

This likely happened because of your iPhone needing to close Safari and any open tabs as part of the update. I don’t think there will be any way to recover the tabs.

Turn Private Browsing on or off on your iPhone or iPod touch - Apple Support

“When you use Private Browsing, the details of your browsing aren't saved, and the websites you visit aren't shared with your other devices. Safari won't remember the pages you visit, your search history, or your AutoFill information.”

If you remember the pages and had saved your progress to the websites you could go back to them. I recommend saving them as bookmarks incase this happens again.

Bookmark webpages in Safari on iPhone - Apple Support

This part is a long shot but, if you were finding these websites using a Google Search, while signed into a Google account, you might be able to access your Google search history to hopefully find them again.

Good luck and I hope this is at least somewhat helpful.

It’s the new privacy policy they just implemented. No idea what could be going but it’s always sketch

Yeah at this point I just gave up on it because usually if you have an iPad you could connect to the open tabs on your iPhone but even that was erased from the cloud so there’s no way to get it back unfortunately:(

I'm in panic mode as well. Same thing happened. I've always used the Private web tabs and I never had a problem updating the software until now. My private tabs in Chrome and Firefox are still there. Only Safari Private Tabs are gone. I tried restoring my phone to a previous back up. That didnt work for me. It's hard to imagine that that data is gone forever. Hoping it's something Apple can fix. Fingers crossed.