Symmetry is a synonym for beauty and rarity, and generally perceived as something desired. In this paper, we investigate an opposing side of symmetry and show how it can irreversibly “corrupt” a computation, and restrict a system’s dynamics and its potentiality. We demonstrate this fundamental phenomenon, which we call “configuration shift-symmetry,” affecting many crucial distributed tasks on the simplest gridlike synchronous system of cellular automation. We show how to count these symmetric inputs depending on a lattice size and its prime factorization, how likely they are encountered, and how to detect them.