iPhone 4 Contacts Disappeared After Receiving Text Message

I had the same problem, this happened cause of iCloud in my case.

Solution:

I didn't like iCloud so I delete it. So iCloud took my contacts with it, cause contacts box was 'on' instead of 'off' position.

So do the following:

Activated iCloud again:

Settings -----> iCloud----->activated your iCloud account------>you should have your contacts after activating iCloud.

If you want to delete/remove iCloud:

Settings----->iCloud----->Contacts------>turn off the contacts' switch on/off first, before removing iCloud----->go to the bottom of the screen and click 'Delete Account'.

Done! shoot me a text if this work for you.

vjbz

I lost over 750 No's!!! All I have have on my phone right now are my contacts in my email(hotmail) which is about 440 contacts. These are the same email addresses on my hotmail which I had keyed in the numbers manually the last couple of days. The funny thing is, there are a few, maybe less than ten that have their contacts No's with the email, which I clearly remember key-ing in. How is this even possible? Apparently, my icloud was not turned on but nevertheless, what does that got to do with the numbers disappearing? The ****** things is I have deleted all my other contacts while I was doing the transfer. You can clearly see, that even if I can recover the No's it would only be all that on my email addresses. What about the other 300 odd No's?

Thanks pinkibike! It didn't work for me though..I barely collected 100 Number so far from email replys. What a nightmare!!! looks like as I keyed in the No's, the icloud moved into the bermuda triangle!

Has Apple ever commented on this? I've been having this problem and just now thought to look to see if anyone else did. I don't use mobileme or icloud. My phone will randomly delete contacts and texts. I don't really sync my phone with my Mac but I did notice the contacts that are deleted were the ones entered on my iphone but haven't sync'd to my Mac address book. But the problem here is I don't see an option to control the sync!! Unlike other devices there is no option to select newest, or more recently changed, etc........

Regardless as I said I don't sync often so i disabled that....yet still have the issue. about ready to ditch the phone

Ditto here. No Mobile. No iCloud. I synch with my Mac and with Exchange. Thank goodness for exchange.

Any contact I enter on my phone mysteriously disappears within days.

I'm at my wits end and feel like an idiot calling my clients up trying to figure out who the numbers with no name belong to. They are impressed!

Apple, this is truly inexcusible! I've been an Apple user since '84 and for the first time I'm considering tossing this ****** thing because it's use is harmful to my business.

Given the length of time this issue has persisted with no fix, I'm starting to see Apple as the new Microsoft. "We're too big to care."

I had recently my contacts deleted. It turned out that it wasy caused by enabling the iCloud. However is not much to worry about and is thought to be a temporary glitchas explained here: iPhone contacts disappear.

Didn't work for me. I know I've entered one person's contact and phone and email info 3 times. Each time it disappears and I cannot recover it. It's doesn't come back with a backup and synch. It might if I entered in my Yahoo contacts on my pc then sync. I don't know. But this is a HUGE flaw and it must be fixed. APPLE???

just got the iphone 5 on friday and 3 days later it is deleting contacts, texts and photos. great improvement! will be switching to something else. if apple would just acknowledge there is a problem and that they are working on a fix I'd stick it out. But since it seems like they won't, I'm not going to deal with it for another 2 years when I can buy something else that doesn't just randomly deletes my data

I just had all (everylast one) disappear from my iPhone. I have recently put everything in teh cloud and things were great. Then, suddenly all gone. BUT they weren't gone at all - purely by chance, I went to the "Groups" page (icon at top left on the contacts page) and everything was unclicked. I simply checked "all contacts" and everything showed up. Don't know why "all contacts" got unchecked, but this was the simplest fix I have ever seen. This may be a well known fact to the rest of you, but thought I'd at least put it out there. Maybe it helps some. Joyce

Hi Grant,

I did not. I had the email addresses because they were already in my email. I use hotmail, so those contacts were in my hotmail already. How did your contacts disappear? Every time I meet someone (Mac technician) I ask them about this because I am still so puzzled.

Trace

Trace

Hi there. My contact email addresses came across from my Yahoo email account. I'm can't recall how mine ended up like this. Now I only have about 20 or so contacts left that are telephone numbers. All the rest are in email form. I have tried restarting my phone, an actual reset via the settings menu. I don't know what else to do to get it back to normal. I to am very puzzled.

So I'm left with 70 odd contacts and their numbers have just disappeared into thin air.

Like you I was hoping someone within the community would now how to fix this.

Grant

Well, I may have figured out how to fix it. Mine all of a sudden disappeared, but contact A-M were still there. After the Ms was a list of odd letters and numbers like this:

AMNEWEMOJ2341

AMNEWEMOJ2342

and so on...

Well, I noticed that EMOJ were in it, so I deleted the Emoji 2 app and walah! My contacts reappeared! I've had Emoji 2 for a while so I'm not sure why it did this. So far I have all my contacts back. Maybe it's an Emoji virus?

Well, I've just got my iMac fixed after over a year and I will restore all my contacts through that. At the moment they are in my hotmail so that is safe too. I am yet to key in anything directly on the phone ever since..Once I have sorted out my contacts I will try playing around with the icloud and everythings else without worry..

Got a new 4S about 6 weeks ago as replacement for the one I bought in March, seems to give some kind of problem too call dropping, hanging now and then, hopefully it was the os6. Updated it now and so far so good...Man, had problems with Ipad too in less than 4 months got a replacement about two weeks ago and still giving problems. need to take it back to get that fixed or replaced! It seems the quality standard put in is dropping or I may be having the bad apples..

Trace

I figured it out for my iPhone. My situation was this, I have Gmail and Yahoo on my phone. My Yahoo had contacts, my gmail did not. I noticed that all of my contacts that would "disappear" were in my Yahoo mail contacts when I logged into my PC. I never added them to Yahoo, I added them through my contacts on my iPhone, but somehow they were in my Yahoo contacts on not on my phone. I deleted my Yahoo account from my iPhone and reentered all of my contacts that had disappeared from my iPhone back from my Yahoo contact list off of my PC. I then added Yahoo mail back to my iPhone, but didn't enable contacts. I hope this helps.

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone could help as I have come to my wits end!

A few weeks ago I dropped my iphone and it the screen stopped working completely. I could still here the shutter noise whilst holding the relevant buttons so I did a hard reset and boom working phone 🙂 I noticed however in my messages there where no names only +44 numbers so i checked my contacts and they had ALL dissapeared. Now if i search a name in spotight who appears in my sms list it comes up with there name ?? Now i have not being signed into icloud for over 6 months and when i do try its says i have had the maximum amounts of icloud accounts. Now i cannot use my mac to fix the isue because i have broken it 😟 I went into the shop where i bought my handset brand new and he advised me to update to the new ios 6.1 which i have but still no contacts......please someone help !