M.I.A. CF7 Form – form missing

Our website has (or had) only one single CF7 form created, and inserted into our Contact page using the form’s shortcode. Recently I visited the Contact page and saw the raw shortcode there, along with a 404 “Not Found” error.

This same thing happened about a year ago.

On the edit screen for the contact page, the shortcode of the form was still there.

I visited the admin list of CF7 forms, and there was?nothing?there; no entries in the list, no evidence of there ever having been a CF7 form created. The form had been?somehow?lost or deleted. I have no idea of how that could have happened.

Human error? Only two people access the site’s admin area. The site owner, who claims that he definitely did not try to edit the contact form in any way, and me (the website developer), and I hadn’t touched the form, nor had any reason to, for a long time. I am pretty sure that I did not delete it, and I think the owner, if he’d been aware of accidentally doing so, would have told me.

It wouldn’t be easy to accidentally delete a CF7 form without knowing it, I don’t think?

Hacking? When this happened last year, I had our webhosting company run a thorough malware scan of the site, which came up clean. And why would a hacker want to delete the contact form anyway? I don’t think it was any kind of hacking.

Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this? Can anyone image any scenarios that would have this result?

I’m just trying to understand what might have happened, and at least come up with a possible explanation for this curious turn of events.