My iPhone 7 Plus can’t send or receive “air drop” messages to my iPad Pro 2nd Gen since 2 days ago when I installed iOS update 17.1.2.

I stayed up late last night and ran the new update from/to iOS 17.1.2 to 17.2. I tuned on my iPad this evening and decided to test air drop first thing. Sure enough, the update brought back air drop. Problem fixed. Ultimately the issue was caused in the last update which had a bug that caused the loss of air drop between my iPad Pro and my iPhone 7 Plus. I read the description of the update and one of the fixes said it was repairing some bugs. And voilà, I have air drop back. It’s the worst time to lose it for even a few days with transferring Christmas gift lists back and forth between my devices. I am very relieved. This will help get me through until I can start using my new iPhone.

Yes, it’s the same iCloud account which I have had for a very long time. I recently upgraded to the next level of iCloud though. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if you believe my issue has something to do with the cloud, then I suppose it could possibly be related to the change in my iCloud account. I also bought a new iPhone about a month ago, but I haven’t transferred my data from the old iPhone to the new one yet because we’re in the process of changing cell phone carriers. We both would like to keep our phone numbers and are waiting for one of us to have the time to call both companies to get permission to keep our numbers and then get signed up. I pirchased the new iPhone directly from Apple, so they know I have it, but I’m not using it yet because I don’t want to use it with our current (very expensive) provider. But I can’t imagine a scenario where that would cause a problem with air drop. Do you really think Apple can help me with this issue? I couldn’t find any recent information online about this situation. Thank you for responding. ~C.