That week in March where every auto-layout broke at once

Opened a project I hadn't touched since February and Figma just refused to recognize half my constraints-buttons were floating in space, text boxes were overlapping. Has anyone else had a whole file just corrupt itself like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

margaret_lane1mo ago

Oh wow, I gasped reading this... buttons floating in space? That's terrifying. I've had Figma do weird stuff to me but never full-on corrupt a file like that. Last month I had a text box just decide to stretch across my whole artboard for no reason, I thought I was losing my mind. But losing constraints entirely? That's a whole new level of broken. Did you try reverting to an auto-save or did you have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch?

green.mason1mo ago

Really though? Auto-save has never saved me from a corrupted Figma file. It just saves the broken version over and over. I had a component set completely detach from its parent once. Every child instance went rogue. No constraints, no auto layout, just chaos. Had to rebuild 12 screens from scratch. You got lucky with that text box issue. Button drift is the new boss fight in Figma apparently.

christophermurray3d ago

12 screens is brutal. Ive had that same thing happen with a navigation component I built for a client. The parent got corrupted and suddenly every single instance was a broken orphan. But the weirdest part was it still showed the right name in the layers panel, just all the nested auto layout was gone. I ended up having to export everything as SVGs and rebuild the whole prototype from a backup I keep on an external drive. Figma's version history only goes back 30 days on the free plan so that was useless for me. What gets me is how random it is. Some files Ive had for years with zero issues and then a brand new simple file just implodes for no reason.

-1