iPhone Crash Erased All Messages

[mrockm01]

I was running 4.3.4 (ignored last update) and some funny things happened to my iPhone 4 while I was sending an MMS. When I clicked send, the phone immediately went to the all black screen with the apple logo and brought me back to the lock screen. I thought this was strange enough, but I went to the messages app to find out all of my messages were gone (I had 30,000 or so). I checked everything else on the phone was still there. I am currently restoring from last backup to fix this problem (2 days old but that is a different story).

To make a long story short: Has this happened to anyone else? Or do you have any ideas about why this could have happened?

 

[MultiMediaWill]

Jailbroken devices are unstable.

 

[mrockm01]

Jailbroken devices are unstable.

Mine was not Jailbroken

 

[fender57]

Mine was not Jailbroken

Mine wasn't jailbroken either, and the same thing happened to me. I don't know if I had 30,000 messages, but I had messages going back a few years.

 

[Lee Adama]

that is an awful lot of messages. I've read where keeping an excessive amount of text messages and call log will make the phone do weird things.

Without knowing the specifics of your phone, my best guess would be the amount of text messages had something to do with it.

 

[mrockm01]

that is an awful lot of messages. I've read where keeping an excessive amount of text messages and call log will make the phone do weird things.

Without knowing the specifics of your phone, my best guess would be the amount of text messages had something to do with it.

Alright, thanks everyone for your responses. I have just never heard about this so didn't know it was even a possibility. If it happens again, I will start deleting

 

[gobears81]

This happened to me this morning

The same thing happened to me this morning that you described. I was at ~100% battery life and I just sent a text (that happened to have an ñ in it -- I doubt this would have crashed it, but I just wanted to include that) and the phone went black and restarted and all my messages had been deleted.

BTW, I have a 64gb 4S running the latest iOS.

 

[mozTom]

This happened to me too

Originally I hadn't been sending a message or anything, just trying to pull up Messages, it'd show nothing then crash out. I rebooted the phone (iPhone 4 CDMA on 5.1, not 5.1.1, just fyi) and then I had no messages at all. I sent a message (iMessage, not SMS/MMS) from the Photos app (while it was busy crashing when trying to open messages), and apparently it worked because the recipient responded when I'd rebooted the phone.

It's hard to find posts like this because when I google I find people who've had it happen with just one contact, or posts about how cheating spouses delete texts, but nothing about "zomg, all my texts from forever have disppeared". It's happened before on my 3GS, but back then I was making daily backups, currently my latest backup is from 6 months ago but apparently iCloud has a newer one (edit: crap, earlier the newer one was yesterday, but to see if I could restore I plugged the phone in and it updated the iCloud backup, so WARNING: DON'T PLUG YOUR PHONE IN UNLESS YOU TURN IT ON AIRPLANE MODE FIRST), I guess I'll just restore and hope for the best.