Text messages disappeared

This happened to me today too. I'm on an iPhone 6 running 10.2. Started out when I had all my messages then tried to send a text to a friend & after I hit "send" the text disappeared & didn't show up as a blue bubble. Tried it again & same thing happened. Then I reopened messages and all my history was gone.

Phone is a little tight on space so I tried deleting some videos & apps to see if that would help, nothing so far. Within storage settings it's showing a few GBs attributed to messages so they're definitely all still there, just some communication is broken. Really frustrating. If anyone has a solution, let me know. Don't want to lose them all or have ghost GB's of messages taking up space on my phone when I can't access them.

My mother has the same problem on her iPhone 6, but in her case, the messages haven’t disappeared, they are just invisible. Push ‘Search’, type a letter, any letter, and all the missing messages pop up. I have seen some responses to the effect that iCloud storage might have something to do with this, but that simply isn’t the case. In this case, as in many previous posts, iCloud has available space.

This has happened to me 2x over the last month. At first I didn't think much of it but now I have lost some texts that I absolutely have to have!!! Has anybody figured out a solution to this? I noticed this last night after a video was texted to me. Perhaps that's a factor?

vivreAireAimer,

Did you read the posts above in this thread?

If so, you will see a user reporting success as follows:

• Turned on flight mode.
• Closed all apps one by one by double tapping home button and swiping them up off the screen.
• Pressed and held power button for 5 seconds, then pressed and held home button for 5 seconds.
• Opened the Settings app to the Wallet and Apple Pay screen. I do not use Apple Pay. Double-Click Home Button was enabled, and I changed this to disabled.
• Pressed and held power button for 5 seconds and proceeded to power the device down.
• Powered the device back on and the messages were all back to normal, and Touch ID worked again.

If that doesn't work, you should restore your messages from backup:

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup

I'm experiencing the same issue. Curious if there ever was a solution. Tried a restart and it didn't work. I notice when I check my storage it says 1.24GB next to messages, so it seems that my messages are still on my phone just not visible to me. I have a iPhone 7 plus. Need a solution badly.

This is insane. Iphone 6SE, around 8GB of free space and one night boom all of my messages just disappear + the new ones seem to have a trouble coming in, while showing up at my macbook via iMessages (desktop version). Next morning text communication restored but all the previous messages still gone — restarted, rebooted, installed newest OS (had a previous version when problem occured), but nothing helped.

This can not happen just out of blue. Why isn't Apple addressing this issue? Where is an explanation and resolution?

Missing messages cause major inconveniences now since a lot of contacts and work related matters were done through messaging. Outrageous.

Looks like we're all screwed, friends! 😮 An I.T. guy here at work said that messages aren't saved on the iCloud. You might be able to get them back if you backed up your phone to a computer, but then you have to erase and restore everything from that backup. The fact that nobody from Apple has chimed in about how to get messages back on a thread that is 5 months old speaks volumes.

I’m having the same problem as well. I had upgraded OS to 11.1 deleted a bunch of apps hoping it would help and it’s still happened. Messages show on my iPhone and messages on my computer but everytime I receive a message it doesn’t notify me on my phone, then when I go look for it it’s there and when I go back it’s gone. For some reason the green bar sits there even though the message was already received. Then a few mins later it’s gone completely.

MOUNSER

Perhaps you are out of storage:

Go to Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage under STORAGE go to Manage Storage. It will then show the apps that are using your storage listed in order of usage.

Then focus on the apps with the most storage and delete data as appropriate. Large videos and podcasts that take up a lot of storage, can often times be deleted because you can usually download them again if you want view them.

Note: deleted photos are not necessarily deleted from the phone. You may have to go to Photos > Albums > Recently Deleted and delete them from there to truly free up storage.

If you're not out of storage, try a restart:

Restart your phone

Good luck.

Burbotspit wrote:

Anyway, a guy at the ATT store told me to hold down both my "increase volume" button and the power button until the phone shut down. Then turn it back on. Could not believe it: all my texts were back.

Correction: to do a forced restart on an iPhone 7/7+, you hold down the power button and the down volume button, not the up. Holding the power button and the up volume button does nothing but raise the volume and turn off the phone.

The directions are different for the 6S and earlier and for the iPhone 8 and X.

If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch won't turn on or is frozen - Apple Support

I had this problem today on my iPhone 6S running iOS 11.2.2. I had left my device off overnight, on charge. When powering back on this morning my Touch ID fingerprints and all my messages were gone. A search did not refresh the messages. Turning the phone off and on again did not refresh them. After reading this thread I was inspired to try the following:

• Turned on flight mode.
• Closed all apps one by one by double tapping home button and swiping them up off the screen.
• Pressed and held power button for 5 seconds, then pressed and held home button for 5 seconds.
• Opened the Settings app to the Wallet and Apple Pay screen. I do not use Apple Pay. Double-Click Home Button was enabled, and I changed this to disabled.
• Pressed and held power button for 5 seconds and proceeded to power the device down.
• Powered the device back on and the messages were all back to normal, and Touch ID worked again.

I doubt that all steps were required, but it solved the issue and all of messages and touch ID are back to where they were.

As Mr.Bill stated , you need to check your storage - if your phone storage is full or getting full your messages will automatically start to delete . The phone needs a least 2GB free to function properly , The device will try or optimize storage

Seems to be happening after back up! My backup ran last night and now all messages deleted. Looks like they are still on phone but where???

Apple needs to realize that they need to get some kind of storage solution! This is ridiculous! Some of us use our phones for work!!!

My problem started just yesterday afternoon with my iPhone 6s Plus on version 10.2.1. When a friend texted me, I couldn't open the message. The screen also suddenly disappeared. I tried opening old text messages and the same thing happened - the screen just vanished in a blink of an eye! Meanwhile, in the last three days I had been trying to install the latest software (10.3.3) but without success, so I sought assistance from Apple technical support who instructed me to update my phone via the iTunes store app on my PC. And that's exactly what I did. I successfully installed the latest software hoping that the text message glitch would be resolved, but alas it did not. Storage is definitely not a problem as I have plenty.

I have been calling my family and friends and telling them not to send text messages indefinitely as I cannot read them or respond to them; so I asked them to call me directly instead. I didn't realize how frustrating it would be not being able to text!

I would appreciate any suggestion as to how to remedy this problem. Thank you.

This is totally a disaster. Message app was grayed out and nothing was visible after the upgrade. Tried several times restoring from iTunes backups but all the messages have disappeared. Everything else restored except the messages. Even the recent call history restored but not even a single message. Spent 318 minutes with Apple tech support online and nobody could give a solution.

This is really disappointing. Apple being such a reputed company has to have better ways for data recovery. There were very important messages and I lost them. It's shame that Apple doesn't have a way of recovering data and telling us they can't do anything from their side. They have all the unwanted things but no backup for message app in iCloud at least. This really has to be addressed very seriously.