Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

I just contacted support in the same way as described and here's what they had me do.

1. Log into Outlook.com and go to the Settings area (gear at top-right)
2. Click the Mobile Devices part of settings. In my case there were more than 40 entries for "Outlook" and another 20 or so that said "OutlookUniversal." There4 was also one labeled "ChatService."
3. Delete each one individually from that list. Note that when you hover on one and click the delete icon your choices are "SAVE" and DISCARD" click SAVE, even though you might think to click DISCARD. (bat bit of UI coding there!)

That took several minutes of clicking/waiting, but when I was through I had 390 contacts in the category called "OnePlus6TSingle" where before I had nearly 4,000. The tech told me to wait for about 12 hours and they should all be gone.

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.

Same problem, steps for my resolution:

• Android phone: Settings -> Apps -> Link to Windows -> Permissions -> Turn off "Contacts" (slider color changes from blue to grey)
• Desktop PC: Open Outlook desktop app -> Contacts -> under My Contacts in the left pane, right click "Contacts - Link to Windows" and select delete

Duplicates removed, original contacts good, phone removed all duplicate contacts in a few minutes immediately thereafter. Problem resolved.

How this passed Microsoft's QA is puzzling.

17Apr2023 update: Considering the volume of issues everyone has posted, I poked around a bit more and discovered that setting a synchronization filter helped a lot - like 0 (zero) contacts in the "<name> Galaxy S8 (contacts synced by Link to Windows)" file and my correct quantity of (no duplicate) Contacts while Phone Link appears to work well. My steps: Open Outlook desktop. Click on Contacts to display my regular/normal list of contacts in the Contacts file plus the file entitled "<name> Galaxy S8 (contacts synced by Link to Windows)", Right click the Link to Windows file. Select Properties, then the Synchronization tab, then Filter. Add a filter. In my case, I tried two different filters with the same result of zero contacts in the "Link to Windows" file: 1) Enter my last name in the Search for the word(s) field, then Apply; or, 2) Click on "More Choices", then enter a criterion that will exclude all contacts. The result in both cases were zero contacts in the "Link to Windows" file, no unusual behavior with the rest of my contacts and no duplicates. Note that I did not check Outlook web yet.

My "solution" was to:

1. Turn off contact sync in Link to Windows on android
2. Turn off the Your Phone app (unlink the phone)
3. Using the Outlook for Microsoft 365 app (comes with paid business version of a subscription to Office 365), adding the outlook.com account to it, letting it sync the contacts and then deleting from that app, in the Contacts-section, deleting all the duplicate contacts (located in a separate folder called Link to Windows) and letting it sync for an hour or so. All the duplicates vanished from the desktop app, but about 8 000 were left in the cloud,
4. The following day, I added my outlook.com account to the Outlook for Microsoft 365 app I have at my office, and again synced, deleted and waited. Now the cloud duplicate contacts were down to about 1 600.
5. Then on the outlook.com website I deleted 10 contacts at a time (a slow and tedious process, where you have to wait 30-60 seconds for the delete-option to become available after selection). It took about 3 hours of my life.

I will never, ever use Link to Windows again, and I from now on I will sync my SMS via the google solution.

It is astonishing that Microsoft quality control has failed so totally, and also unbelievable that you cannot delete more than 10 contacts at a time in the cloud.

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??