Missing contacts with iPhone iOS 17 update

Hey there Msmousiemouse,

If the contacts that are missing were only stored on the iPhone and not synced to any other service, like iCloud, then they are likely not recoverable. Is it possible they were also synced to iCloud at any point, or are they not appearing in the "All iCloud" list?

If they are not included in "All iCloud", check to see if there were any changes made to how they appear on your device. Go to Settings > Contacts > Accounts, then enable Contacts for the accounts you might have synced with previously.

The next thing you can check is how they're set to appear by looking at Settings > Contacts > Default Account.

If you still cannot locate the contacts, contact Apple Support: Get Support

Take care!

This worked for me. The new update turned off my primary email account settings, removing my gmail contacts. Go into your settings // contacts // accounts. Check that the “contacts” under your accounts are turned on. Go back into your contact application and refresh. All of the contacts should show up.

I have been having the missing contacts issue as well, it was only certain contacts. I talked with Apple Support and for me it was because I had toggled off my Contacts in my email/mail account (Settings, Mail, Accounts, then choose the email account, toggle on Contacts). Once I toggled that back on, my missing contacts came back, as well as the All Contacts list.

update: did a full reset, then restored from backup. still had the problem. did a full reset again. this time did not restore from a backup. the phone then properly sync'ed and brought in all icloud and google contacts. Summary: for me, the fix was a factory reset and NO restore from backup - painful, painful solution. beyond ridiculous. not happy - but happier than yesterday. Iphone SE @ ios 16.x, problem occured upon update to 17.1.1 on 11/22/23. Good luck, folks.

My phone auto-updated with the newest 17.2.1 last night and this morning, same thing, same issue described here. I, like many of you, sat on the phone with Apple Support for what felt like a long time only to be told over and over that it wasn’t a bug from the update, that it was a Google error. Someone on this thread said they went to their contact list for Google on their browser and looked in the trash and sure enough, Apple had deleted all of my contacts on my Google account. Not a Google issue, but an Apple bug. I was able to restore all of my contacts and get them back into my phone. The other thing I did was export my contacts and save them as a CSV so that if this ever happens again and I am unable to restore them like I did today, I will have them to import. I hope this helps!

17.2 did fix it for me pretty quickly - I have a lot of contacts (4,000+) so it took a while to sync. If still not syncing, it might be worth deleting the mail account (and deleting email from the iPhone when asked), rebooting the phone and then re-installing the mail account including making sure 'Contacts' is switched on for syncing purposes afterwards.

Happened to me this morning as well. Went to update but didnt work. My default email is gmail. So went to gmail account and contacts. For some apparent reason, in the trash bin, says contact was deleted by iphone. Restored all contacts and everything resynced. Thats what worked for me.

I found this in the thread and it worked.

“I fixed this by going into settings>icloud>(apps using iCloud) contacts > toggle to keep contacts on phone. Then turn the phone off and on again.

That brought my contacts back to everything. Then I just toggled iCloud back on for contacts and merged them again.”

I lost all contacts as well that were less than 4 years old. I went into settings and discovered that my outlook and iCloud emails were not set up and therefore not feeding my contacts.

I added the accounts back, my contacts started to reload.

I shut it down twice and restarted the phone. They are all back now.

Installed iOs 17.2 today and the issue is solved!

I did this and seems to have worked for my iPhone.

Settings

Contacts

Accounts

Outlook

Then clicked contacts

🤷‍♂️

Go to Settings > tap your name > iCloud to have a check. If the Contacts Sync is on, you can toggle off/on to refresh the sync between your iPhone and iCloud.

Settings

Contacts

Accounts

Outlook

Then click contacts

This was the solution for anyone with this issue. my contacts were attached to my email addresses so once I logged back in I got them all back.