Contacts missing after iOS 18.6 update

PS - this is a brand new 16 pro max and the data transfer went perfectly and was all good for a week or so….

has to be an issue with apple no matter what they say!!!

Even after trying to recover contacts from iCloud? I was about to try that.

You are right. If I pull up a text and enter the name of a missing contact, the name pops up. But the person is not listed in my contacts and it only saves as a phone number. Ugh.

Same here! What a disaster, I rely on these Contacts for business. Catastrophe.

Nothing of this helped

Sorry but you are wrong as the person below has mentioned (I also run my own Unjx consultancy)

this is a bug or an issue with APPLE and not us users !!!

I reset and restored from backup (which was from pre-update) and my contacts were all back. Then, 2 days later, suddenly while using the phone midday, they disappeared again. Frustrating

One month now without my contacts and apple has done absolutely nothing to help me fix

If you read the thread from the beginning you will see many people have spent hours with Apple support without success

Also notes in contact, Company name and reference details are missing

what are you doing apple ?

This happened today to my wife's iphone 16 pro after it updated to 18.6.3. So this seems to be a thing that can happen after any update from at least 18.6 on.

It's unfortunate that Apple has not acknowledged or corrected this after so many months of it being an issue.

For any Apple employee that cares to have an IT person run down the symptoms of this so you can actually fix it, this is for you.

In here case:

1. she has icloud as her default location for contacts. She has had it that way for years. The small number of contacts coming from other connected accounts are FINE. It's only the icloud contacts affected.
2. She backs up all possible categories to icloud.
3. Like everyone experiencing this, She doesn't have most of her contacts listed in the contacts app either on the phone or on icloud.com.
4. Even though her phone backed up to icloud at 2:20 am this morning prior to any update by a half day, the only "archives" listed in icloud.com data recovery are from AFTER the update.
5. She has the same symptom as most that if she types a name when composing a text, all of that person's relevant info shows up until the text is sent.

IT guy speculation: Symptom 5 seems to indicate that either a) the contacts aren't really gone, they just aren't displaying correctly, or b) the contact informtion maybe cached somewhere and Apple may be able to use that to recover the contacts if the update deleted them.

For those that have missing contacts after an update, to know quickly if it's the Apple update contact bug, or if it's a problem with another account, you can simply do this: go to the contacts settings and see what your default is. If it's icloud, and you have contacts set to sync in icloud, then this isn't your fault. If you had it set to exchange or gmail or some other location, and that location is not syncing, then it may be you had unsynced contacts that are now gone.

Now a queation: has anyone who lost contacts, can see them in the text composeing area, and had icloud as their default contact location tried a full reset and restore? Do the icloud contacts correct after a reset and restore?