ITunes Match deleted ALL my playlists

About 6 weeks ago or so, I noted that one of my favourite playlists on iTunes Match had disappeared.  I had absolutely no idea how this could happen as this is a Cloud based service with an integrated back-up.  Now - today - I find that ALL my playlists are gone too.  Any ideas who/what is responsible ??

I had this exact issue.  Spent over an hour on the phone with apple support, they couldn't resolve.  Here is what I ended up doing, that worked.
1.  Turned iTunes match off on all my iOS devices
2.  Deleted the offending playlists from the iOS device they originated on
3.  Started iTunes, let it run (literally) for an hour before it became responsive.  First thing I did, before clicking anywere else was disable iTunes match.  If I clicked anywhere, it would clock for another hour.
4.  Let iTunes run overnight, by morning it had cleaned out the repeating play lists.  This got my Mac/iTunes back to an operable state.
5.  Restore iPhones from backup in iTunes.
What was causing my issue was a single playlist that was created on an iPhone, then suddenly showed up with several thousand duplicates on my other iPhone.  The culprit playlist did not, for some reason, duplicate itself on my two iPads.  Apple support seemed to think it was because the problem iPhone tried to sync the playlist to iCloud over and over again unsuccessfully, then it finally went through and populated the thousands of blank/failed playlists which then tried to propigate to iTunes and my other iOS devices.  Seems like a reasonable theory.
I have not yet re-enabled iTunes match.  So, no idea what will happen if I decide to go back down that rabbit hole.

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