Hey, What Happened To All Of My iPhone Contacts?

Image courtesy of (strobist)

Are you facing life without any of your iPhone contacts? Davin is, and so are a lot of other people. Apple’s response? Well, they don’t have a solution. Their best answer is that, well, these people should have backed their contacts up to iCloud.

Davin writes:

Recently I lost all my contacts on my iPhone. Everything else works fine, just that all contacts have been wiped. This occurred after the text message app crashed which led me to reboot the phone.

I did a quick Google search and turns out a bunch of other people had this happen to them over the past few weeks. It’s too much for this to all be a coincidence, evidence points to a problem native to apple (esp since this has occurred on several carriers).

I contacted apple who were not able to help explain or remedy the problem. I alerted them that this is a widespread issue but they seemed to brush it off. I’m pretty pissed off since the computer that I had backed up my contacts to (a Mac) recently had a HDD failure and I hadn’t turned on iCloud backup. There’s no way for me to recover my contacts. The tone I got from Apple was that it was my fault for not backing up, but it’s clear to me that this was caused by a defective product.

Here’s a link to an apple discussion board with over 80 replies from people who have had the same thing happen to them recently.

Indeed, iPhone users from all over and various carriers experienced a similar software failure. Even if they had backups, it’s a scary thought that your phone could suddenly eat your contact list while you’re out in the world…especially if the kind of crisis for which people carry mobile phones cropped up.

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