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Martech5 min read

Manus is splitting from Meta, and it deletes what you generated with the Ads Manager connector

By zAI

Manus is splitting from Meta, and it deletes what you generated with the Ads Manager connector

The connector Meta pushed inside Ads Manager back in February never had permission to touch a campaign or move a budget. It was read-only. That detail did not save the data. Manus, the company behind the agent Meta installed in the tools menu for every one of its advertisers, announced on August 11 that it is going independent again, and that accounts caught up in the split will have everything generated since December 29, 2025 deleted. The window to back that material up closes August 23 at 07:59, Singapore time.

An agent that arrived through Meta's menu, not through vendor evaluation

Between February 16 and 21, Meta placed Manus inside Ads Manager: a new entry in the tools section, sitting between Instant Forms and Media Library, rolled out in stages with in-stream prompts pushing advertisers to try it. Report building, campaign analysis, audience research, always with read-only access. It is the same pattern we tracked with the six official MCP connectors across ad platforms: an agent that shows up inside the tool you already use, with the platform deciding the access level, and the advertiser connecting because the platform surfaced it, not because they vetted the vendor themselves.

From acquisition to split, in one chain of events

Meta had closed the acquisition of Butterfly Effect Pte Ltd, the company behind Manus and Monica, on December 29, 2025, with an on-record statement: "We are excited to announce that Manus is joining Meta to bring a leading agent to billions of people." The figure circulating, over $2 billion, comes from the Wall Street Journal; Meta never confirmed it. On March 18, Manus launched its own Meta Ads connector in beta, with outputs in slides, dashboards, and sites across multiple accounts. On April 27, China's NDRC, the foreign investment regulator, ordered Meta to unwind the deal (widely covered by SCMP and CNBC, though the order itself was never published). In June, according to a Bloomberg report not confirmed on record, Meta began cutting Manus off from internal systems. The August 11 announcement followed: Manus is going independent again "to comply with regulatory requirements in specific parts of the world," and it states plainly that this is not a security breach.

The operative fact: what gets deleted, and when

According to Manus's help center, affected accounts have their enabled connector authorizations deleted, along with the tasks and artifacts generated after December 29, 2025. There is a distinction here that depends entirely on when the account was opened. If it was created before the acquisition closed, with no email or data changes since, only the activity after December 29 and the enabled connectors get wiped; the rest of the account stays intact. If the account was created on or after December 29, 2025, or had its email or data changed after that date, the deletion is total: account, tasks, subscription, everything tied to it.

The calendar runs on Singapore time. The backup window opened August 11 and closes August 23 at 07:59. Between that point and August 25, Manus becomes inaccessible in affected regions while the deletion runs, and the restoration portal opens August 25 at 08:00. Restoration brings back third-party connectors too, though the toggle to re-enable them has to be flipped manually. The way to know whether an account is affected is the in-app notice, which Manus sends through the app and by email.

Who sits on the riskier end

The cohort most exposed to a full wipe is, almost by definition, whoever opened a Manus account on or after December 29, 2025, the same window that starts with the deal closing and runs straight through the Ads Manager rollout in February. Whoever connected an ad account because Manus showed up in Meta's own tools menu, pushed through pop-ups and prompts, has better odds of landing in the group that loses the whole account, not just the recent data.

What read-only access did not protect

Here is the counterintuitive part worth sitting with: the connector never wrote anything, never touched a campaign or a budget, and the deletion still wipes out what accumulated on top of it, recurring reports, dashboards, pieces generated through scheduled tasks. The risk sat in accumulating work on top of an access layer that another company can cut off over a regulatory decision the advertiser has no say in, with write permissions never entering the picture. It is a variant of the same question we raised about who owns the layer you measure with, there through a merger between measurement vendors, here through the forced separation of an agent Meta had built into its own product. It also stands in contrast to the rest of Meta's own Ads Manager track record this year: both one-click CAPI setup and Andromeda added capability without depending on a third party that could later be spun off entirely.

What is still unresolved

Manus does not name the jurisdictions affected. It says "certain users" and "specific parts of the world," with no way to know from here whether that includes or excludes LATAM accounts; the instruction that holds regardless is to check your own in-app notice. Neither Meta nor Manus has said what happens to the Meta Ads connector once the split is complete; that remains an open question, not a confirmed fact. What is actionable in the meantime is concrete: check whether the in-app or email notice arrived, download whatever the connector generated before August 23 at 07:59 Singapore time, and remember that the reconnection toggle does not flip itself back on after the 25th.

Sources