There’s a new and rather scary bug in town that is affecting one of the most popular instant messaging services right now. According to many users, as soon as they delete a contact from their iPhone running iOS 17, the associated WhatsApp chat also tends to get deleted. It deletes the entire chat history, media, links, and all the other shared files of that contact in one go.
To rectify this issue, users have already tried re-adding the contact, but to no avail. This is because adding back the contact didn’t bring back their WhatsApp chat and users instead had to start from scratch. As a result of this, many have lost their crucial messages and important files that they had exchanged with that user. So this begs the all-important question- is there a fix? Let’s find out.
Deleting Contact will delete WhatsApp Chat on iOS 17
There does exist one workaround that you could give a shot at- uninstall WhatsApp and then reinstall it along with restoring the chats. However, before you do so, make sure that the latest backup was made before that was deleted from your phone. If that is not the case, then this tweak will be of no use. If you take a backup now before uninstalling it, then it will override the earlier backup that had the deleted contact and nullify the process.
Moreover, even if your last backup is from that time frame wherein the contact was still saved on your device, then upon restoring it, you might end up losing a few chats that happened after that backup was made. For me, a loss of a few chats from a couple of contacts is still manageable as opposed to the deletion of all the chats and documents from a particular contact. But to each their own, so decide on this trade-off accordingly.
As far as the official stance on this matter is concerned, the developers are aware of this issue wherein deleting Contact ends up deleting WhatsApp chat on iOS 17, but they haven’t given out any ETA for the rollout of a fix. As and when that happens, we will update this guide accordingly. In the meantime, the aforementioned workarounds are your best bet.
