What's causing corrupted prefabs?

We’ve been encountering issues with prefabs suddenly becoming corrupted. The symptoms are:

  • Instantiating the corrupted prefab from a script causes Unity to completely crash.
  • Attempting to drag them from Project to the scene in the editor is not possible and shows a “No entry” circle sign.
  • Their properties are not shown when they are selected in the editor.

It’s an issue that pops up every week or so, affecting different team members on different setups. We haven’t managed to find a reason yet.

The only solution is to recreate the prefab from scratch, losing hours of work.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Do you know of a solution?

I can offer no solution, but I can confirm this happening since I just lost a good hour figuring out why Unity kept crashing and a corrupted prefab was the culprit.