iCloud contact labels changed with latest iOS 16 upgrade

It is Microsoft Outlook!!!! At least from my testing. It all started when I installed "Microsoft Outlook for Mac" on my computer at work so that I could check my Apple Mail. (Didn't want to use cellular data on my iPhone and my work Wi-Fi blocks Apple Mail.) Microsoft Outlook I think is using Microsoft syncing to Apple which screws everything up. Once I uninstalled Outlook on my work Mac contact phone "labels" would not change. I restored my contacts from logging to icloud.com and looked for an old date to restore. It's been not changing any Contact labels since I unassociated Outlook to anything Apple.

Has anyone found a work around? This happened with either the 16.0 or 16.0.1 update and is still an issue with the recent 16.0.2 iOS build. It does not change every contact in every case but because it is unpredictable, it is worse. Apple patch needed to fix this as it does not seem to be anything a user can correct.

If you add your iCloud account in the app Microsoft Outlook on your iPhone, after 6 to 15 hours, the phones, adresses and emails labels of some of your contacts are changing. For example on 30% of my contacts, home address is changed to address, Mobile number is changed to Phone… in my iPhone contact app (but stayed ok on iCloud.com). I have been in contact with Apple support level 2 for 2 weeks before finding the solution to remove iCloud in account in outlook app.

Is there a fix to this yet? I spent multiple calls with support to try to get this to fix.

Hi everybody,

I've been experiencing this issue since a couple of months now, today I logged in my iCloud account and noticed that when there are more than one entry for phone numbers (e.g. home, work, mobile...) they are changed to the default labels from the dropdown menu (in the pic below they were originally home, mobile, main) moreover in case default labels are customized a text string is added to the phone number (in the pic below the customized label originally read "Cellulare")

same thing happens when the contact is a company (in this case the label has been changed to mobile and a text string added right after the number)

I have now fixed them in iCloud just to check how long it will last or to figure out what is the triggering event. Hopefully someone more professional than me can use this info to fix for good this annoying bug.

Feel free to ask any further detail if needed.

Macs

Yes do it! I can’t believe this had been going on for many, many months. With no feedback from anyone at Apple. Very poor on their part. And it’s happening to a critical app for everyone.

Apple: this is a disaster and driving me crazy. Makes Siri hands free useless… “Siri. Call Sonya mobile.” “I’m sorry I don’t have a mobile number for Sonya.”

and so I look up Sonya, and all her numbers are “phone”. So I switch them (for the tenth time) to home, mobile, etc … just so that in a week or two the revert back to “phone”

please fix this.

Same problem. I have 2400+ contacts in my phone that are affected. WTF am I supposed to do about that, Apple?

I am seriously disappointed in the quality of their software now. This type of issue is supposed to happen only to Android users, not the infallible Apple domain.

get it fixed.

Sadly, this is false hope. I’ve been having this problem dating back to September. I’ve been really good for the last three weeks. I just checked my phone and it’s happened again today. Once more, the Custom Labels came through in a different way. A screenshot from moments ago:

and a screenshot from 16-SEPTEMBER:

I, too, have this problem and it predates iOS 16. It's been happening for about two months on both the last two versions of iOS 15.6 and 15.7. I've had my IT department scratching their heads. I've deleted every single app on my phone that could be pushing this data into my contacts (Teams, Outlook App); I'm basically down to banking and airline apps at this point. I've tried turning off syncing contacts with iCloud, MS Exchange, etc. I spent an hour with Apple Support yesterday and we did a total reset reset of my 13PRO phone. The custom label data came back. Sometimes, I will delete the custom labels and it won't return for a couple of days. Other times, I will delete it and it comes back in less that 15 minutes, which was the case with Apple Support. Moreover, the custom label fields don't seem to come back in the same way every time - e.g. two days ago MOBILE, WORK, OTHER, EMAIL came back as choices. This morning, just MOBILE and HOME came back. Seems completely random.

I FOUND WHERE THE CUSTOM LABELS ARE COMING FROM!

I've posted a couple times in the last 24 hours with updates. The CUSTOM LABELS are being imported when you add a contact via TEXT from another iPhone user. I ran the test today with a coworker. He texted me a contact that had a CUSTOM LABEL "batphone". I added it to my phone. Then I checked another contact and wham-o, my existing contact now had the CUSTOM LABEL "batphone." I deleted the newly imported contact, but still had to go back and delete the "batphone" CUSTOM LABEL.

Be careful when importing contacts from other people if you care about your data.

In my case, my iCloud account was on outlook just to sync my calendar. And it was the problem. Did you verify in outlook on all your devices that you don’t have the iCloud ? For outlook it is an email account only in the options in the application at the bottom left. You can’t see that in the iPhone setup.

No. Those labels are gone. Sometimes, I’ve noticed, if you click on the number to edit it, the label is at the end of the number mixed in with a bunch of other code.