Fix Contact Form 7 Failure

My WordPress installation is fully up to date, yet right after yesterday’s Contact Form 7 update the entire site and wp-admin went down with a fatal error until I renamed the plugin folder through FTP. Since then I’ve tried two clean reinstalls of the plugin, but each attempt to activate it in the dashboard still triggers the same fatal error in WP Admin.

Nothing else on the site seems affected—every other plugin runs fine and I haven’t touched themes, settings, or installed anything new. The job is simply to identify and eliminate whatever is breaking Contact Form 7 so the existing forms function exactly as they did before the update.

Deliverables
• Contact Form 7 activates without fatal errors
• All current forms load, submit, and send emails correctly
• A full explanation of what caused the issue and the steps you took to fix it.

Feel free to enable WordPress debugging, review server error logs, or stage the fix in a safe environment—whatever you find most efficient. Once everything is working again I’ll test each form and release payment immediately.