❯ Manus Reopens Account Access; Data Deletion Was Regulatory, Not an Outage

CLARIFICATIONManus’s account restoration portal opened at 8:00 a.m. Singapore time on August 25. The company explicitly denied that the August 23–25 service interruption and data deletion were a security incident or database failure, attributing the episode to a return to independent operations and compliance with regulatory requirements in a specific jurisdiction. One step further back: Meta acquired Manus late last year for about $2 billion; this April, after a review, China’s National Development and Reform Commission found the deal violated foreign investment and technology export regulations and ordered a breakup.

DATA LOSSUsers fall into three categories. Legacy users registered before the acquisition date with unchanged account information lose only the task data generated after the acquisition and any enabled connectors. Accounts registered on or after the acquisition date, or that changed their email afterward, have the account and all task data deleted in full. The key: recovery relies on users importing backup files themselves — the platform will not auto-restore. Anything not backed up before August 23 is permanently lost. Web projects returned 503 during the outage, and missed scheduled tasks will not be re-run.

COMPANYOn compensation: legacy users receive a one-month subscription credit or a free subscription; subscriptions activated after the acquisition are refunded pro rata. The company moved its headquarters to Singapore in June 2025, and its annual recurring revenue once grew from zero to $100 million in eight months. But regulators applied look-through attribution, determining control from the source of core algorithms, the location of the R&D team, and the ownership of training data — the Singapore shell did not shield Manus. The room to maneuver in cross-border AI M&A has therefore been compressed considerably: switching registration jurisdictions is no longer a viable solution.

▪ SIGNALOne acquisition denied, and the cost lands on users’ historical task records — the most concrete settlement of AI startup geopolitical risk to date.