all my contacts in outlook disappeared. how to retrieve?

How to find all my contacts that has disappeared?

Here's how I retrieved mail and contacts when they disappeared from my Outlook (older version, not the new one). I clicked View in the ribbon, then Folder Panes, then Normal. Evidently, they were there all along but were not displayed.

I recommend switching to the new Outlook for those who are having problems with Outlook's many quirks. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles, is still a bit quirky, but I can function with it. I have two accounts there, one Comcast and one Gmail. When I'm using the Gmail account, the calendar and contacts are synchronized with Google Calendar and Google Contacts.

I was spoofed and hacked pretty badly in this recent, past October. Why me? I'm just a Nobody! I wound up manually re-entering all of my contacts into my Outlook account. They were not retrievable from Microsoft. It took a lot of time and patience, contacting who knows who to get family, friends, etc. back in my contact list. I created an account with another email server just to establish another contact list in a second recoverable place. And I no longer sync my Outlook contact list with my phone. So, I now have three unsynced contact lists. Plus I wrote all of my contacts onto a real paper list. If I lose one list, I have back-up others.

I too used a Hotmail account, which was deliberately reported as being blocked for several weeks and still is as far as I can tell. Its a disaster because I have lost the addresses of my contacts there. I have complained but no response from MS. So Ssurloff, we share this problem with I presume a lot of others ex users too! If I ever get it back I expect that after the regulatory month of no activity it will all be cancelled. MS are in it for the money and not through trying to be sincere and helpful and this should be obvious from the complication they want to see before anything might be done to unblock it.