Manus notifies users of data deletion ahead of its return to independence

What the note announced

On 11 August 2026 Manus published a notice titled "A Note to Our Users". Its central message was that the service would soon return to operating as an independent company. The same note warned that some users' accounts would unavoidably be affected during the process — a recognition that a change in how a service is organised can reach individual accounts, not just the company behind them.^[1]

The data schedule

The most concrete part of the note concerned data. Manus said that, to comply with regulatory requirements in specific jurisdictions, data generated by certain users on or after 29 December 2025 would be deleted. The deletion was scheduled to run from 8:00 a.m. on 23 August through 24 August 2026, Singapore time.^[1]

Users whose data fell under this arrangement could back up their own copies until 7:59 a.m. on 23 August 2026, Singapore time — one minute before deletion was to begin. Restoration opened at 8:00 a.m. on 25 August 2026, Singapore time.^[1]

Read together, the timetable divides the transition into three windows. First a backup window, closing just before the deletion starts. Then a deletion window running across 23 and 24 August. Then a gap before restoration begins on the morning of 25 August. Anyone relying on the service for ongoing work would have had to plan around that sequence rather than around a single cut-off date.

Who had to do what

Manus drew a distinction between affected and unaffected users. People whose data was not caught by the arrangement could keep using Manus as usual without taking any action.^[1]

Affected users were to be told in two ways: through a notification inside the app and by email. The note added a specific instruction for one group — users who had registered with an Apple ID or a Facebook account were asked to check their in-app notifications.^[1]

That detail matters in practice. A message sent to the email address on file may not reach someone who signed up through a third-party login and never treated that address as a main inbox; the in-app notification is the channel such users were pointed to. The burden, though, sat with the users whose data was in scope: they had to notice the message, decide whether they needed a copy of anything, and act before the backup window closed.

Why it matters

The note is short and procedural, and it does not describe the corporate steps behind the return to independence. What it does show is the practical side of such a transition: regulatory requirements in some jurisdictions translate into deletion of a defined slice of user data, a fixed schedule in a single stated time zone, and a notification process that has to reach people through more than one channel.

For users, the useful information is all in the dates. Data generated on or after 29 December 2025 by the affected group was in scope; backups were possible until 7:59 a.m. on 23 August 2026, Singapore time; deletion ran from 8:00 a.m. on 23 August through 24 August 2026; and restoration opened at 8:00 a.m. on 25 August 2026, Singapore time. Everyone else was told simply to carry on.^[1]