My contacts are creating duplicates in the thousands for no apparent reason. The merge option worked at first, and then the problem returned and worsened. This might be a virus but I don't want to lose all my contacts, and this may have spread to my backup and to iCloud. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
iPhone 15, iOS 18
Thanks for your suggestion. The syncing was not due to the multiple accounts. I worked with apple support and we discovered that the problem was in icloud. I was able to sync to an earlier date that reduced the number of duplicates, then I erased duplicates manually on icloud. This caused all my devices to eliminate the duplicates. I talked to two supervisors at support who had never come across this issue and did not know what could have caused it, but the problem has not yet returned.
Thanks for your suggestion. The syncing was not due to the multiple accounts. I worked with apple support and we discovered that the problem was in icloud. I was able to sync to an earlier date that reduced the number of duplicates, then I erased duplicates manually on icloud. This caused all my devices to eliminate the duplicates. I talked to two supervisors at support who had never come across this issue and did not know what could have caused it, but the problem has not yet returned.
It sounds like you are syncing contacts from Google or a Microsoft account such as outlook or hotmail. Your phone does not have a virus, but syncing across multiple account such as this is problematic. Are you actually using a third party service to store your contacts? If not, shut off syncing to those accounts and stick with iCloud and you will not have any problem.
Contacts app is creating thousands of duplicates
