The short version: Manus is returning to independent operations after Chinese regulators blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition, and it is deleting user data generated while Meta owned the company. If you are affected, you have until August 23, 2026 at 7:59 a.m. SGT, which is 7:59 p.m. EDT on August 22, to back up your work. Deletion runs across August 23 and 24, restoration opens August 25, and for most affected users the account itself stays active. This is a regulatory unwinding, not a breach and not a shutdown.
The emails landed this week with a subject line that reads like a data breach notice and is not one. Nothing was hacked. No servers failed. A government decided that a company could not be owned by the company that bought it, and the cleanest way to comply was to delete the records created during the period of that ownership. That is a genuinely new category of reason to lose your work, and it is worth understanding before you decide what it means for your own tool choices.
What actually happened between Meta, Manus, and Beijing?
Meta acquired Manus, the agentic AI startup behind the autonomous task agent of the same name, in a deal reported at around $2 billion that closed on December 29, 2025. Manus was domiciled in Singapore but founded in China, which left it inside the reach of Chinese foreign investment and export rules.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission blocked the transaction on April 27, 2026 and ordered the parties to unwind it, as CNBC reported at the time. Reporting from CNN noted the decision was escalated beyond the economic regulators to the National Security Commission, the party body chaired by Xi Jinping. On August 11, Manus confirmed in a note to its users that it would soon resume operating as an independent company.
One consequence of that unwinding is the data deletion. Manus describes it as necessary “to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions” and states plainly that it is not the result of a security incident.
Whose data is being deleted, and why that specific date?
Here is the detail most coverage has skated past, and it is the part that explains everything else. The deletion window is not arbitrary. It starts on December 29, 2025, the day the Meta acquisition closed.
In other words, Manus is not deleting a backlog or clearing storage. It is surgically removing the data that was created while the company was under foreign ownership, because that is precisely the data whose legal position the regulators object to. Work you did on Manus in November 2025 is untouched. Work you did in February 2026 is not. Users who are unaffected can carry on without doing anything at all.
The help center now sorts affected accounts into three types: accounts that predate the acquisition, accounts whose Pro subscription started on or after December 29, and accounts created on or after that date. The last group faces full account deletion rather than partial, with a separate small account backup file used to restore identity afterward. Check which notice you actually received rather than assuming the mildest case.
Once you see that, the boundary stops looking random and starts looking like a legal line drawn through your task history. It also tells you something useful about scope: the trigger is ownership, not content. Nothing about your specific work made it a target.
What happens to sites and apps you built in Manus?
Update, August 11: Manus has now answered this in its help center, and the answer is yes, they are included. The deletion scope explicitly covers “task data and all Manus-generated artifacts,” and the help center article names websites as its first example. The restoration guide is equally direct: “After you restore your Task Data Backup, your deployed websites will come back online automatically.”
Read those two statements together and the practical picture is this: a site built on Manus during the ownership window goes offline when deletion starts at 8:00 a.m. SGT on August 23 and stays offline until you complete restoration, which opens August 25 at 8:00 a.m. SGT. That is at least two days of downtime for your visitors, more if you restore late. Two constraints reward care here: restoration can only be completed once, and the backup is a snapshot, so anything you create after your last backup run is not in it.
The quieter gap is the database. Manus-built apps store form submissions, sign-ups, and user records in a managed database, and the backup guide lists the export contents as “your tasks, generated files (such as websites and slides), and configuration data.” Databases are not on that list, the codebase download is code only, and nothing in the restoration guide says stored app data comes back with the site. Manus’s own advice elsewhere, in its Cloud Computer billing docs, points to the fix: when infrastructure is going away, ask Manus in a task to back up critical databases to your local machine or cloud storage. That instruction was written for a different scenario, but it is the company’s only published method for getting a database out, and this is the week to use it.
What the documentation does establish is that your code is portable. Manus’s website builder lets you download the entire codebase for an application, described as a complete copy of the frontend and backend files, and it supports two-way syncing with a private GitHub repository. Downloaded code can be hosted on any server.
So if you have anything live on Manus, four things are worth doing this week, in this order. Ask Manus in a task to export each app’s database to files you can download. Download the full codebase for each project. Push both to a repository you control. Then contact Manus support and ask, in writing, whether custom domains reconnect automatically after restoration, which is the one operational question the help center still leaves open. Do not wait until the twenty-second to ask.
If you are not sure whether a site of yours is actually served by Manus, there is a quick way to check. Run curl -sI https://yourdomain.com from a terminal and read the response headers. Sites served through Manus return an x-manus-proxy-mode header, and it shows up even when the domain sits behind Cloudflare and displays your own custom domain in the address bar. If that header is present, the site is running on Manus infrastructure no matter where the domain is registered, and it belongs on your list this week.
What should you do before August 23?
If you received the email, the mechanics are straightforward. Run the backup from the prompt in your account, then save the export somewhere that is not Manus, meaning a local drive or your own cloud storage. Data that is not backed up cannot be restored.
Two details are easy to miss. First, you can back up more than once, and anything you create after your last backup will still be deleted, so if you keep working through the window you should run it again near the end. Second, the notification went out by email and in-app, and users who signed up through Apple or Facebook may have no deliverable address on file, so the in-app notice may be the only warning some people get. If you know someone who builds on Manus, it is worth a message.
Manus says affected users are not charged during the backup period from August 11 to August 23 and that welcome back bonuses will follow restoration. Check that against your actual billing rather than taking it on trust.
What is the real lesson for a small business?
Not that AI tools are unsafe. The tool works, the company is not collapsing, and the people who built on it will be back in business on August 25. The lesson is narrower and more useful than a scare.
Every serious conversation about vendor risk in the last two years has been about pricing, outages, or acquisition. We wrote about the acquisition version of this when SpaceX bought Cursor, and the advice then was to know what you would do if your tool changed hands. This is the same risk with an unfamiliar mechanism attached: your vendor’s nationality and ownership structure are now operating variables, and they can reach your data without anyone doing anything wrong.
You cannot forecast that. What you can do is make your work portable before you need it to be, which is the same instinct behind keeping AI work on hardware you control, something we covered in the case for AI that never leaves the building, and the same reason it pays to read the license before you build on a free model. Export is a feature. Check it exists before the work matters, not during a two-week window.
The businesses having a calm week are not the ones who predicted a Chinese regulatory ruling. They are the ones whose code was already in a repository they own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Manus shutting down?
No. Manus is returning to operating as an independent company after Chinese regulators blocked Meta’s acquisition and ordered the deal unwound. Most accounts remain active throughout, though accounts created on or after December 29, 2025 are deleted entirely and restored from a separate account backup file. Affected users lose access for the two days of the deletion window on August 23 and 24, 2026 SGT, with restoration opening on August 25.
Why is Manus deleting data from December 29, 2025 onward?
That is the date Meta’s acquisition of Manus closed, so it marks the start of the period when the company was under the foreign ownership that regulators objected to. The deletion is scoped to data generated during that ownership window in order to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, and Manus has stated it is not the result of a security incident.
Will my Manus-built website or app be deleted?
Yes. Manus’s help center confirms the deletion covers task data and all Manus-generated artifacts, with websites named as an example, and states that deployed websites come back online automatically after you restore your Task Data Backup. Expect your site to be offline from the start of deletion on August 23 until you complete restoration on or after August 25, and note that app database contents are not listed in the backup, so export those separately before the deadline.
Do I need to do anything if I was not notified?
Unaffected users can continue using Manus as normal and need take no action. Be aware that notifications went out both by email and in the app, and users who registered through Apple or Facebook sign-in may not have a working email address on file, so it is worth opening the app to check for an in-app notice rather than relying on your inbox alone.
We keep coming back to one question here: if your AI vendor changed hands tomorrow, how much of what you have built could you actually take with you? Tell us in the comments.
