Detachment of a surface from a viscoelastic layer, such as a film of glue, engenders bridges between the surfaces until separation. Such surface instabilities arising during contact and detachment of viscoelastic films with rigid contactors have been theoretically explored by linear stability analysis and nonlinear simulations. The contact instabilities of viscoelastic materials are found to manifest in either a 'critical' or a 'dominant' mode in which the former is preferred when the contactor is slowly brought near the film while the latter manifests when the film is 'hard-pressed' against it. The nonlinear analysis considers the movement of contactor during adhesion-debonding cycle, which uncovers that the kinetic parameters can overshadow the thermodynamically predicted area of contact, average force for pull-off, energy of contactor-film separation, and pathways of debonding. Three distinct pathways of debonding- peeling, catastrophic column collapse, and column coalescence, are found to manifest with the variation in the ratio of the elastic to viscous compliances of the viscoelastic film. The study also reveals that in the dominant mode of instability, a smaller length scale with a larger area contact between the contactor and film can develop patterns having aspect ratio 10 times larger than the same obtained from elastic film. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.