Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

An update to my earlier post: not fixed... :(

I have now installed Outlook - Microsoft 365 (Family) 64-bit client and connected to my outlook.com account to try to delete the contacts from there (ALL contacts; my actual contacts are safe in my Google account). This did display the new Category under synced Contacts named 'David's S23+ (contacts synced by Link to Windows)' and I was able to select and delete it....

...so, in the Desktop client, the duplicated contacts (and Category) have now gone (after double checking desktop sync had worked, and deleting, reinstalling & reconnecting to my account), HOWEVER, they have NOT gone from my Outlook.com web account and are still stuck there with the only way to manually delete being a few at a time.

My hope is that the sync may take some time to complete across all cloud servers (maybe overnight??), as this seemed to work for Fredrik70 in a possible solution post earlier in the thread (thanks), but am concerned these may now just be orphaned objects only actionable from the outlook.com web client :(

Will post an update tomorrow if any changes...Thanks to everyone who has posted so far with this problem.

Update from last post: Unfortunately, as I thought, today the contacts are still present via the outlook.com web interface but are gone from the Outlook local client (synced) - these are definitely now orphaned objects, and the only means of deletion appears to be manually 10 at a time....

We are also left with an orphaned category (Phone name, Contact synced by Link to Windows) which is visible under the contact list, but not under outlook.com categories; this also can't be deleted.

I'm surprised this hasn't been more widely reported as a bigger issue, but to those that are affected (and who have noticed yet, depending on how they filter contacts on their phone), it is no joke having to manually delete 23,000+ entries....

Update from last post: Unfortunately, as I thought, today the contacts are still present via the outlook.com web interface but are gone from the Outlook local client (synced) - these are definitely now orphaned objects, and the only means of deletion appears to be manually 10 at a time....

We are also left with an orphaned category (Phone name, Contact synced by Link to Windows) which is visible under the contact list, but not under outlook.com categories; this also can't be deleted.

I'm surprised this hasn't been more widely reported as a bigger issue, but to those that are affected (and who have noticed yet, depending on how they filter contacts on their phone), it is no joke having to manually delete 23,000+ entries....

It's not a joke indeed. IF you need your Outlook tidy, then it's something they will have to do (personally for me, I could only select 2 at a time, not 3 or more but I don't pay for office 365 so maybe that's why). If you could do WITHOUT the Outlook stuff, might as well try my first solution. At least it restores the phone to a usable state.

Hello again. I had to go to Outlook mail on the web to send an e-mail (I don't trust the built in mail app), and I found on "deleted items" all the duplicate contacts. Went onto "Contacts", and all the "tags" and the contacts were deleted, except the ones that I sideloaded with the csv file, exported from my Google contacts, after my aforementioned solution.

Perhaps what I did was enough, and after a while the server caught up and deleted them. (It could also be that deleting all the contacts while still logged into the Microsoft Exchange account on the phone sent the "sync notice" of no contacts to the server, and it had to take a while - I really don't know).

I was in contact numerous times with Microsoft Support and after a while I gave up. I ended up modifying a javascript i found on Stackoverflow which deletes all orphaned contacts from console in Chrome/Edge devtools. It was not straight forward, the tab crashed several times because it ran out of memory, but in the end I was able to delete all ~16 000 orphaned contacts and got the sync working again... (edit, removed script after complains on the forum). Problem is caused by bug in Microsoft product, and should be solved by them. I did not have the patience to wait so I ended up fixing it myself with a script...