Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

Yes for sure,

but I hadn't time to wait The main problem for me it's that it seams that Microsoft doesn't make anything to purge the duplicated contacts.

We are only a small count of customers with the problem... we are nothing ...

I've reached out to the Phone Link team on Twitter with a link to this issue and got a response that they're looking into it.

https://twitter.com/RafaelGoodman/status/1644334312626479104

Happened to me as well - six thousand duplicates from about 150 contacts. I managed to deal with it by resetting the Phone Link app in Win 11 on both my PCs, and then ignoring prompts to re-link my phone. Next I installed the Outlook Desktop email client (I have a MS365 subscription) on one of my PCs. The duplicates appeared in a folder named "<nameofphone> Synced by Phone Link". I highlighted the whole lot, deleted them, then deleted the "Synced by Phone Link" folder. After a while the deletions started syncing to my phone, and by the following day the duplicates had all gone. They also disappeared from the Outlook web client. My genuine contacts were untouched and the duplicates have not come back. There is no way I will re-enable Phone Link until MS acknowledge this bug and confirm it is fixed.

I did report the bug via the Feedback hub, and had a reply a couple of days later. I was obvious from the response that they had not read my original report properly. I replied again explaining exactly what had happened, and also the steps I had since taken to fix my problem. They said they were glad I had fixed and the conversation ended there. I did not have the impression that they were at all interested.

Sync contacts is gone from current, up to date, Windows 10 Phone Link. (3. April 2023)

Just a quick update to those that seem to have resolved the issue as per the previous replies:

I too used the solution to delete 'Contacts, Link to Windows' on the Desktop Outlook Client, and yes that has appeared to delete all the contacts, and the category from the Desktop Client, AND my phone, AND looking at contacts on Outlook.com in a browser, in mobile site view (No contacts showing under People). :)

However, my duplicate contacts unfortunately do still remain when viewed on a Desktop (Edge) in the Outlook.com Web client or on a mobile browser, in Desktop Site View (Mobile view shows as empty!). These contacts are therefore orphaned just for the web client - they don't show up any more in the Desktop client or on my phone, which may seem like the problem is fixed for those that don't use Outlook.com directly, but for me at least, they are still stuck there!

I urge people to check Outlook.com directly to see if all traces of the contacts have genuinely gone (congrats to those that have!), or if anyone else is stuck like me, with these orphaned contacts which I am now having to delete manually a few each day only viewable on the web client (20,000 to go...but 3000 less than last week!) :(