I purchased a new iphone and transferred my contacts to it. I then manually deleted the contacts on the old phone. Both phones were linked to my cloud acct. Now the contacts are not on either phone or the cloud. Is there any way to get them back?
When two devices are sharing the same account, any action you take with the synced data (like deleting contacts) will happen on both devices. If the deleted contacts were on your phone when you last backed it up to iCloud, you may be able to recover them by restoring the backup as explained here: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4841.