42000 contacts and growing, how to stop this Apple Tomfoolery?

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42000 contacts and growing, how to stop this Apple Tomfoolery?

We have MS o365 and several thousand contacts.

Apple continually adds contacts....now over 42000 contacts and growing with no end in site.

Attempting to delete all contacts from iCloud and the system/webpage keeps going wonky as it seems you can only delete a 100 or so at a time. Delete all contacts does not work as the page is too slow and times out. It has been almost 3 hours to delete 42K+ contacts.

Turned on/off and finally deleted all my contacts on the local phone.

Getting ready to re-sync with 0365, any best practices or should I go back to Droid as I never had this stupidity in syncing with my Droid.

iPhone 13, iOS 18

Posted on Jul 18, 2025 10:11 AM

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Answer 1

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Mac Jim ID

Level 9

53,906 points

Jul 18, 2025 10:22 AM in response to MrJackBoston

Sign into your Office account on the website, how many contacts are showing there?

Microsoft has acknowledged a problem with their Outlook servers that does cause this duplication and also adds erroneous text to some fields which are then again synced as it thinks it is a different contact. You can review the post here by the Microsoft agent so you know it is not just me making it up. There are many more posts in the Microsoft Support site where it affects other devices as well.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/why-is-outlook-duplicating-my-contacts-in-icloud/0a6cbd4b-64bc-4b86-b394-099ea5e50670

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