Birthday calendar duplicated hundreds of times on iOS 10

Ah, I have had precisely this experience over the past two days. The iPad Calendar / Calendars display shows hundreds of "Birthday" calendars, just like the image in the opening post. I have deleted all the real calendars in iCloud (after exporting them), then deleted all Internet Accounts on the iPad and logged out of iCloud; still the hundreds of "local" "Birthday" calendars remain, and are entirely undeletable. I can't jailbreak iOS 10, so I can't just rip them out of the file system. I could rip them out of a backup and then reload the backup, but the only tool I found to do that (iBackupBot) flat out doesn't work (crashes reliably after reading the backup every time). Starting with a virgin iOS installation is not an option because data will be lost.

For information's sake, here's what iExplorer displays as the repetitive calendars -- there's a lot more there than Birthdays. (Sadly, iExplorer can't actually modify the backup, or I'd be golden.)

I should add, for the irony factor: I even attempted to delete the Calendar app as a last resort to flushing the bad calendars. The iPad responded with a dialog box informing me that deleting the app would not delete any of the calendars or events -- great, precisely the opposite of what I needed.

Same here... Really annoying it drains all my battery...

I've had this same problem for over a week now. Calendar is pretty much unusable and I've tried deleting/uninstalling and reinstalling accounts and it hasn't worked.

I also live out of my calendar and this has caused a lot of stress and frustration- glad to see that it's not just me going through it, maybe apple will find a fix. Sort it!

I can amplify that: it has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook.

My client (who owns the problematic iPad I have documented in other posts here) clarified for me this morning that he is and has always been absolutely opposed to the idea of Facebook, has no Facebook account, and has never used the Facebook website. Yet, as you can see from the image I posted, his iPad is loaded with null calendars named "Facebook Birthdays," as well as "Birthdays," "DEFAULT_CALENDAR_NAME," and "DEFAULT_TASK_CALENDAR_NAME," in perfect rotation.

Something very evil is going on here.

This thread is getting big.

I want to stress out, that it's not only Birthday calendars.

Like @paparocks, I have hundreds of empty generic iOS calendars.

My gut suggests to me that the bad calendars are not real Birthday calendars (especially since Birthday is a "smart" calendar extracted from the contents of Contacts) -- but are perhaps malformed calendars that Calendar interprets as "Birthdays" because they lack some important attribute of a true physical calendar. As we've seen from the iExplorer dump, there are a lot of other bad calendars in there, but Calendar displays every one of them as "Birthdays."

I solved it, I think this is not the best way but for those who doesn't want to wait for a Bug fix, bellow the instruction on what I did... That solved the problem...

1. Make a Backup, also make sure that everything is in Sync with iCloud (I did not restored the backup), so this step was very important, making sure that Contacts, Calender, Photos and so on was in sync with iCloud.

2. If your apps have the option to save data to the cloud, do it.

2. After that go to Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings (BE SURE TO HAVE EVERYTHING IN A SAFE PLACE - BACKUP)

3. After the phone start doesn't restore the Backup.

4. Answer all the questions.

5. Activate iCloud.

After doing that I got my Calendar back from iCloud, also contacts and photos. I lost data of some apps, but I had nothing critical (all my critical thins was in iCloud), and everything comes back to normal. My battery life is back to normal, phone not heating, and so on.

I now that for a lot of you this is not an option, but for those who wants to fix it anyway, I hope this help... If some of you restored the Backup and it doensn't mess things up again, please let me know.

@Mathias Brito,

The procedure you posted is not "getting the problem solved", but "giving up and starting over". For example, the contents in my iPhone 7 have been carried over phone after phone since my iPhone 3G, and I upgraded my phone every year, so that's 8 phones ago and 8 years worth of app / data. Unfortunately wiping it and starting over is not an option.

Since this problem happened and doesn't seem would be resolved quickly, I actually started to carry one additional spare phone logged in with my iCloud ID just for the purpose of getting calendars (I have 6 calendars and working with different group of people, I can't live without using them). Fortunately I have old phone and a spare / free T-Mobile line to use with it.

(PS) yes, if you backup and restore the whole phone, either using iCloud or iTunes, it will bring the problem back. 😟

I think my Reminders app doesn't work, too. Crashes upon a start.

Just checked mine. Also seems to crash out on startup.

Question: not sure if it's related.. but I've noticed my onscreen keyboard seems to lock up and seemingly crash pretty often. I'm thinking maybe it's related to the background calendar process just chewing up all available resources then breaking things.

I've also noted at times that my phone gets to a state where every app crashes on launch (again, thinking excess resource consumption?) that only a restart can fix.

My workaround so far has been to keep my phone on low battery mode (should disable background fetching/etc). Not 100% how effective it's been, but seems to make my battery last longer and be less hot.

Also, I've found that any calendar apps that talk to iCloud directly rather than using the local calendars (in my case, the outlook app. I think sunrise used to do it too.) still work. So while less than ideal layout/UX-wise, at least I'm not completely without calendar access.

FWIW, I have this exact problem on my iPhone 6S, but not on my iPad Air 2, nor my MacBook. It definitely appears to be a local device issue, but looking through the forums shows that this has occurred going back many versions of iOS, so I don't know, but hope, it's just a bug in iOS 10 that will be addressed soon. I really don't want to wipe it all and rebuild from scratch, but if it means protecting the battery life, I suppose I can. But how do I ensure that it won't happen again?

Curious is anyone is having this issue in iOS 9 too... but I suppose it would be more worthwhile if I was still able to downgrade.

Add me to the list noticing this bug. Am lucky in that I only have two birthdays calendars but it's irritating

I am having this same issue. In fact, I bought the iPhone 7 a week ago because my iPhone 6S battery was dying after only a couple of hours so I figured it was time for a new one. Now I have the same issue on my brand new iPhone 7! My calendar app is permanently frozen, crashes and crashes when I go into Settings.

+1 to also having this exact same problem 😟