Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

I now have 12 000 contacts because I turned on the "Allow contact sync" switch on Link to Windows-app on my Android phone. Some contacts have been duplicated several hundreds of times. This is absolutely insane. And they can't be deleted when logging in to Outlook.com, going to contacts. I can delete some one by one, but as soon as I select several, the delete button dims out.

I urgently need help - my outlook conctact folder is absolutely destroyed now because of this mad sync going on. What to do? I want those 12 000 contacts removed NOW.

I am paying for both outlook.com and microsoft 365 fo business. I even connected my personal outlook.com account to the main Outlook-app, and deleted the duplicated contacts from there. They wanished from the Outlook-app, but simply won't disappear from the cloud (www.outlook.com). 

This Link to Windows contact sync should IMMEDIATELY be withdrawn and shut down, this is a critical bug.

SAME HERE! I have 8137! And I had 7k... so it kept going up and up as I was watching. I was a Windows Phone user and ever since then, Microsoft had stupid problems with sync and servers. Holy ****!

This is the response I received from

Greg Carmack Independent Advisor

If Office is involved, then this needs to be posted in the Office forum for your edition of Office here:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/newthread?t...

Yes, I saw, and as it's almost always the case, it's a useless response given like a robot. "I'm and advisor".

Here's a possible workaround/solution. Beware: I couldn't find a way to solve Outlook/Microsoft contacts issue. You will still have 10 thousand contacts there, but this solution is for the phone. Here in my country we use WhatsApp, so it wasn't just the phone book being messed up, my WhatsApp contacts list also had 8 thousand (and counting) contacts lol.

HOW TO RECOVER YOUR CONTACTS:

This is assuming you save your contacts (On the Android Phone) on your Google account. FIRST you could try REMOVING from Sync the "Microsoft Exchange Account" and leave only the Google one. I didn't do this first step, because I saw that ME account was also used in other apps or services (My phone is Galaxy A22), so I didn't want to deal with an aftermath of de-sync on other parts of the phone. Here's what I did to get back to normal.

1. Go to "Link to Windows" app on the phone, and within the app: Turn OFF "Allow to sync contacts" option. Then, REMOVE the PC device you are linked to (tap 3 dots, select remove). And then, tap "Sign out and unlink".
2. Go to the app on the computer, click on your device image (top left), and then when devices appear, 3 dots and remove device to reset that app (this shouldn't be needed as it's unlinked already, but I did it anyways to reset everything just in case).
3. Go to your "contacts" app on the phone, and delete all the contacts. I tried this thinking it would only remove the ME account ones (the thousands) and leave the Google ones alone. But no, it deletes ALL the contacts sadly. However, contacts are SAVED IN TRASH FOR 30 DAYS both on Google and Outlook. So, remove all the contacts and restart the phone.
4. After phone restart, go to Google.com, top right on "more apps" and go to "Contacts". Here scroll down the menu to "Trash". Here you can select all the Google contacts you had that were also erased with the rest (There SHOULDN'T BE 10 thousand contacts here), so you should be able to select all without issues instead of one by one. Then click "Recover". This will recover the contacts to your Google account. After a little while (but hopefully immediately) the phone should re-sync to the Google account contacts and all your contacts should be there again as they were before.

I hope this helped. One last thing: If you can go here and upvote and also click "Similar feedback" to get a bit of traction on this, so MSFT team can get on this asap. I filed a feedback with high severity post: https://aka.ms/AAk7kvp 
Hopefully you can enter even if being from another region. This bug is critical, as someone mentioned above, and it even messes your entire phone/apps. If you need to work with that, having that issue could be a massive problem, especially for people without the time or knowledge to deal with this.

PS: Do not link your phone again, just in case. And as I mentioned, sadly for now, our Outlook accounts will still have 10 thousand+ contacts. I cared only to solve the phone stuff yesterday.

I have the same problem with >23,000 duplicates!! I have disabled Contact sync in both the Outlook phone App and in Link to Windows App & then removed my account from Phone Link on Windows.

There are now thousands of erroneous duplicate contacts in my Microsoft account (in the Cloud, not on my PC) under a Category created by Link to Windows which cannot be easily deleted. I have managed to delete 10 at a time (although the Outlook.com interface is struggling with this number of contacts), and these are going into 'Deleted', but I can't do this manually for the remaining 22,000 or so!!

The link to Feedback Hub is not working for me from the last post (no access), but I have upvoted & added feedback to a similar post for Duplicate Contacts on Apps, Phone Link.

I am still unclear if this has been caused by Phone Link App (on PC), or Link To Windows (on Phone), or in combination with the Outlook App (on Phone) when syncing contacts??

Hello David! I'm very sorry this also happened to you, even with 12k+ more duplicates than us.

It is 100% caused by the PC/Phone link. It's clearly a bug on the contact syncing. It is NOT Outlook app, as I don't use any of those, I use Samsung E-Mail app for mail.

I'm also sorry the feedback hub link didn't work. I guess Microsoft is still separating by region or something. But glad you could find one similar to upvote.
As you very well pointed out, we cannot merge nor remove the duplicates nor the categories, of which I have 2 created by the phone link app. It's atrocious, I am astonished as to how that functionality is not built or intuitive.

I'm exhausted from this and have to do other stuff. But I was going to try to get with Microsoft support tomorrow to see if the Microsoft Account Contacts issue could be resolved and then come back here and post it.