Uninstall and Reinstall without backup

So...... i have been an idiot.......

I uninstalled the Whatsapp App from my phone (IPhone 11) yesterday when it was having connection problems, this was before i knew about the systems being down. I honestly honestly thought it was backed up to ICloud but for some reason unknown to me the backup option was turned off.

When I reinstalled the App back onto the same phone it didn't find anything to back up and only gave me the option to skip restore.

I pressed skip restore and now only have new chat messages received since I reinstalled the App.

Is there anyway that I can recover the historical chats and associated photos etc or is it lost forever?

Advice most welcome as lots of important data appears to have lost.

Cheers