Missing contacts with iPhone iOS 17 update

Hey Msmousiemouse,

Thank you for using the Apple Support Community. Due to the nature of your issue, you may find more information by contacting Apple Support directly using the link below.

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Take care.

I’ve had the 13 Pro about 1 1/2 years and my sim card went bad in Sept! I couldn’t use the phone at all only iMessage! I had to go to Verizon to get a new one installed but what the heck if I were out of the country? I would have been up the creek! No one has any idea why it happened either! My Apple days may be coming to an end!

I've only lost SOME contacts - people I text with regularly started showing up as phone numbers only - then when I tried to check the Contact info, they were GONE! I didn't get to my iCloud backups in time - they only keep 10 in archive, so they were all useless. I don't even know how many contacts I've lost and even the ones I was able to identify from recent texts, I've lost things like email and address info. HORRIBLE experience! Scary and frustrating to try and rebuild from scratch. And why just some of them? I am definitely going to be much better about backing up my phone locally more often. And much less trustful of Apple...

Did a full delete/reset and I was told not to back up from the most recent and do the one before and it worked great 👍🏻 stupid that we’ve had to do this though 🤦🏻‍♀️

Installed iOs 17.2 today and the issue is solved!

Did it fix it straight away? I've just installed 17.2 and no change yet. Still just the few contacts from my Whatsapp, without names.....

I have the same issue. Recently I noticed quite a few of my contacts have disappeared. I suspect it has happened after updating to 17.4. Any help will be appreciated.

My husband is having the same problem. He just switched from an Android phone to 14 Plus a few months ago and hadn't created an iCloud set up yet. Now his contacts are gone because they were not backed up to the cloud. 17.1.2 was what caused the problem, so it is not the fix in this case. I fear everything is lost forever. This is ridiculous, Apple.

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.

I spent over an hour with apple care to try and get my contacts back to no avail. They actually said to contact yahoo as I had an old yahoo contact file. The contacts that disappeared were those entered in not my phone over the past year. Big blunder indeed.

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.

Same thing happened to me after the update. All contacts are now only on iCloud, but some of them are missing entirely! I did a hard reset, which corrected the missing names in text messages, but did not put my contacts back on my phone. They are still only on iCloud and the one contact I was looking for yesterday is still missing. I use this phone for work and now some of my professional contacts are missing. I won't know how many more are missing until I try to contact them. This is huge and Apple needs to fix it ASAP!

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!

You can export all your contacts as a single vCard and use it as a backup. Click the ... in the sidebar, choose Select All Contacts, then follow the instructions above to export a vCard.

You can send the file to the iPhone attached to the email

Import, export or print contacts on iCloud.com – Apple Support

Uninstalling iOS 17.4 now delete this update