I did a support chat with apple about this yesterday. Here are the instructions I received:
As we discussed, here are some steps that may help resolve the issue without you compromising your data.
We want to first start with a backup to iTunes, I recommend making this an ecrypted backup as it will back up the most amount of data for you, make the password easy for you to remember. Please follow these steps closely.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203977
Once the backup is complete, we want to go into Settings > iCloud > Storage > Manage Storage > (This iPhone) > and this will show a list of apps, scroll down until you see Podcasts and turn that off/white.
Once off, go to Settings > iCloud > Backup > Back Up Now.
Once complete, Erase and restore from this iCloud backup.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204184
If you would need to chat us back in regarding the issue you were experiencing today, your case number for today was 940331675.
1) Go to https://getsupport.apple.com
2) click on "See your cases and repairs", which us located below the product buttons.
3) Enter your case number & email address.
4) Click "Contact Apple about this case".
5) After that, click on the option of choice to connect with us by chat or phone
They also said that is more people contact support about the issue, the faster they may resolve it. I'm not doing the restore because it always messes something up for me and decided to use another app for now, but if you do decide to do the restore, make sure you create a back up without podcast app marked or it may not work as others on this thread have indicated.