Sudden disappearance of contacts on iPhone

What is going on here? Exactly the same for me - contact information disappearing randomly - half a dozen just today!

What happened to most of the people on my contacts list , names , phone numbers?

Ditto Ditto Ditto

good luck. I have had hours of phone assistance and went to genius bar 4 times. They say they cannot fix it.

Same here! Apple support told me same thing in 2025 and I still have same problem on a daily basis!?

None of these responses have been particularly helpful. This seems like a big enough issue that Apple should be issuing a statement directly and not leaving it up just to the community to hash out.

Sounds frustrating, especially since you’ve already tried the main iCloud synch steps. If contacts have suddenly disappeared, it’s probably due to a sync source issue rather than deletion. Here are some tips:

Go to Settings > Contacts > Accounts and check if you have multiple accounts (iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, etc.) Sometimes contacts are stored in a different account, and toggling iCloud wont affect those. Turn each account’s “Contacts” toggle off and back on one at a time to refresh.

Login to iCloud.com then press Contacts. If the missing contacts are there, they just aren’t syncing to your iPhone. Trying signing out of iCloud (iPhone Settings, > your name > Sign Out) and back in.

On iCloud.com, click your name at the top then press Data Recovery and select Restore Contacts. You can roll back your entire contacts database to a previous date.

Open the iPhone Contacts app and tap Lists or Groups in the top left. Make sure all groups are checked, some can be hidden because their group isn’t selected.

If none of the above worked, it may be worth contacting Apple Support directly. They can check your iCloud server logs to see if there was a sync error.

Hello everyone! I have never posted before but I figured after successfully getting my contacts back it would be worth sharing with you all because this was VERY frustrating to say the least.

I found out after all of the previous options had failed, you must:

1. Go into your contacts settings
2. Click Contacts Accounts (which may include iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Exchange and any other email accounts)
3. iCloud should already have contacts selected so continue through the others
4. When I clicked into my other accounts, there was something at the top to click which said along the lines of "email not authenticated"
5. So basically, you must re-sign into each of your email accounts through the Contacts settings and then your contacts will basically start flowing back into your phone! (or at least mine did). And I did have to sign back into all of my accounts but this MUST be done through the contacts accounts settings

Hope this helps!!

I panicked when this just happened to me. All I did to fix it was go to phones icon on main screen. Click on contacts then hit lists in top left hand corner and then hit all contacts and they came back.

After the new update over the weekend my phone has started deleting my contacts. This is a huge issue as I have business contacts accrued from the past 10 years that i no longer have access to. Apple, you need to resolve this as a matter of urgency.

Hi,

im experiencing a very similar problem, with a number of random contacts disappearing (all of different random ages). Not sure if this is correct, but it may be that some were contacts that were stored to my Sim. Using Copilot, it stated that there has been a shift by Apple to move away from ‘iPhone’, as a source (which incidentally is still on my wife’s iPhone 16 which is on a slightly earlier OS Version than mine (iPhone 13 on 18.6.2). If iPhone was automatically removed as a List during an upgrade before sim data was synced, this might explain a ‘random’ disappearance of contact data. I’m not sure if new contacts can be added to a SIm if there are connectivity issues - this could add to sporadic pattern of missing contacts - ie when you are adding a new contact, some may go straight to cloud while others might go to Sim. If an account was only on the Sim, and the ‘iPhone’ option was removed from the Contacts Lists, this could explain a sudden disappearance.

i am still exploring the issue, I actually have a separate older phone, which refers to Lists as ‘Groups’, and this is allowing me to see ALL of my contacts (including the iPhone itself). When I restrict this to use iCloud only, I am getting a restricted list, suggesting that some of the contact data is in an alternative source.

one thing that I thought might have fixed the problem on my current iPhone 13, was to select the option to ‘Import SIM Contacts’ thinking that this would import the missing contacts from my SIM (if my theory that the missing data was there), but unfortunately this did not resolve it.

As I say, this is just me rummaging around for a potential cause, but in light of everyone else’s issues, there is a pattern suggesting that an upgrade is the trigger.

Perhaps what I have reported above may trigger a bigger brain to have a light-bulb moment.

in the meantime I’ll keep exploring.

I have lost over half my contacts after ios25 upgrade. I went through all the steps with Apple to have their tech guy say "As you can see, we have taken all steps and that data is no longer available." They have no solution.

Then I noticed that I was being asked to sign into an exchange account for an old business email address I've not used (and I shut down) 14 years ago. Some of the lost contacts have only been added in the past year or two, well after I closed that account and removed from my phone.

I spoke with my IT team who said that it's been lazy programming with Apple sticking a place holder for data against any exchange account they could find on my record rather than saving data.

I have emailed and written to Apple about the fact that I backed up to icloud (as recommended) and I pay for icloud to store my data and it failed. No response.

I have had the problem of contacts disappearing on my Mac, iPhone and iPad. I use the Apple contacts app. My OS is up to date. I have finally determined at least one situation that will delete a contact unintentionally. There might be others. I use the notes section in contacts. If I go into notes, without going into edit mode, and select text I want to delete and move within notes, when I use CMD X on the selected text, the entire contact - all info, not just the selected text - will disappear. If I click on edit, to get in edit mode, it doesn't seem to have the same problem, but I haven't consistently tested this. I'm so paranoid about losing more contacts, I have stopped using CMD X completely. I don't this app is important to Apple. It's extremely slow to do any simple task. My guess is they do the bare minimum to keep it functional. If there was an easy way to move my 2K + contacts to another contact app, that works well, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

I first noticed that my some of my contacts disappeared. Then I noticed I could not find my text messages. Now I have changed my password and it continually will not accept the new one. I am VERY TIRED OF CHANGING PASSWORDS! I hope whoever is reading this can hear me. I do not want to change my password anymore! I deserve to know my password and to be able to use my brain to choose the password I wish.

[Edited by Moderator]

If my old university address, now no longer active, explains the loss of my contacts let me ask this: why is it that hundreds of the contacts I lost have nothing to do with university. They are relatives, business contacts, skilled crafts people, dress makers, etc. Come on Apple;;;;;;; there are lots of smart people out there who know that it is Apple’s negligence that is causing this problem for thousands of people. And they get away with it.

Furthermore, because lots of the folks writing in here say they restored their contact info and subsequently lost it again….I ask: what are we supposed to do?