I see I'm not the only one with missing characters

Leveled my only character to 79 Sorc last night / this morning, was working fine until ~3:00am USEastern, found a Tal’s helm, a mal, some other of my first decent gear, and poof no characters show online or off (I have only played one character since launch, online, and have done no trading etc). 100% confident that I did not delete accidentally, and I shut down everything the same way as normal with no issues.

Super bummed out about this. I hope Blizzard will be able to provide some sort of fix (I see that deleted characters cannot be restored, but surely they could replace at least the character / level if not the exact build / gear?)

Edit: She was back right after I posted this. Hooray! (for now?)

Edit 2: Couldn’t create a game, see any games to join, restarted client and she’s gone again… Un-Hooray…

well sounds like you might have some hope with that first edit. Though if she remains gone… then good chance she is just gone gone. They don’t appear to have any method of restoring the data… guessing they didn’t have backups or something implemented for this.
Here is what blizzard told me about missing items/characters.